More from the recent Voyages of the Ancestors – Vaka Moana exhibition: here’s a rebbelib or chart-stick, a navigational teaching aid from the Marshall Islands.
From the caption in the gallery:
Marshall Islands sailing systems demand extensive knowledge of local currents and swells. Rebbelib are used to instruct apprentice navigators about the direction of ocean currents and the resulting swell and wave patterns as these currents encounter and then move around islands, marked by cowrie shells. Used only as teaching aids, rebbelib were not taken on to canoes.
This is an art piece in its own right – a device with hints of Duchamp’s Large Glass (with it’s “playful physics”); or like a Rover Thomas work, depicting land form, in this case relating to sea but no less instructive of country.
