Oceans fly as birds

In tribal stories, the world is full of wonders: oceans fly like birds, mountains swim like fish, animals speak, and nature can be angry or happy, just like people.

Tribal artists work more from shared memory, the stories and images their community has kept for generations, than from a personal, trained imagination. Their sense of time is very sharp: in songs and rituals, they may talk with their dead ancestors as if they were present.

Tribal art has a flexible frame. An epic may begin from some small, everyday event; paintings merge with the living space, covering walls and floors; and episodes from different stories can mix together, as they do in dreams.

Yet tribal art also follows strict conventions (rules). Each new work builds on an earlier one, and changes it only slightly, and playfully.

Tribal art is relaxed and humorous, even when its subject is sacred. Partly this is because it is not made for sale: there is no buyer to please and no competition between the one who pays and the one who creates.

Dreamlike but ordered; sacred but playful.