The Last Carvers of Airai
Inside the dwindling workshops where master craftsmen still translate clan legends into wood — panel by panel, story by story.
Menemu picks up the adze without looking — his hands know the weight like a pianist knows middle C. In his open-air workshop behind the Airai State legislature, half-finished storyboard panels lean against a corrugated wall. Each will take two more months of patient, deliberate cuts into ironwood.
Reading the Walls Like Pages
The bai was a comic strip before the word existed. Flat, stylised figures with wide circle-eyes enacted fishing expeditions, creation myths, and clan rivalries across repeating horizontal panels. Walk the building’s length and you read the whole story. Turn the corner, and a new chapter begins — carved in fresh wood by a different hand.
“When the bai burned in the war, the stories didn’t vanish. They moved into smaller wood, into hands that remembered.”
— Menemu Rekuls, master carver