The indigenous peoples of Borneo have developed woodcarving to a high level of art.

Boys learnt from their fathers – woodcarving is a male occupation – from quite a young age. They might start by incising decorations in the skin of green bamboo, then graduate to making softwood toys for themselves.

The rainforest offers a wide choice of timbers for every purpose; it yields the materials for building houses and boats, for making household utensils and weapons of war, for producing the elaborate coffins and ossuaries required by the customs of some Orang Ulu groups.

Wood Carved Hornbill from the Iban

Traditionally, the woodcarver’s tools were simple: a long, heavy parang (machete) and a working knife with a long handle and a short, curved blade. Rough outlines were hewn with the parang and sometimes with fire, but all the elaborate decorations were hand-carved with the small, sharp lungga.

Some of the most beautiful carved items are those made for daily use: a man’s parang sheath, a woman’s weaving tools, food containers, ladles and trays. Some communities carved the pillars of their longhouse veranda, and the doors leading to the individual family apartments.

Carved Wood Platter

Much skill and care was devoted to woodcarving for ritual purposes, such as funerary accessories. A healer’s paraphernalia is often stored in a specially decorated wooden container, such as the Bidayuh priestess’s bird-shaped mapu. A human figure with strangely simian features, squatting on top of a nicely carved short stick, is credited with the power of attracting game to a trap. Wooden guardian figures, placed at the access road to a longhouse or by the river jetty, were often grotesques designed to ward off evil spirits.

The Iban carve one specialized artefact: the hornbill. To grace one of the biggest gawai (festival) known to these hard-working rice farmers, effigies of the hornbill are carved, beautifully painted and decorated, and carried in a solemn procession during the celebration. At the end of the festivities, which may take up to one week, the hornbill icons are mounted on tall poles on the longhouse veranda, for all to see.