Where would you go to see perhaps the most ''chillingly grotesque'' face in Canberra? Federal parliament perhaps, where so many already unattractive faces are contorted with ambition?
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Well, perhaps, but for the moment this columnist's nomination would be the National Gallery. There a new acquisition, a wooden chubwan mask, pictured, from Pentecost Island in Vanuatu, has just gone on display.
Crispin Howarth, the NGA's curator Pacific Arts, finds it ''chillingly grotesque'' and says the artist who made it has ''skilfully created a face that would frighten and intimidate''.
Such masks are very, very rare. Sothebys advertises the auctioning of them with the reverence and hyperbole with which it advertises great paintings. They're very old, too. Howarth explains that this one has been radiocarbon-dated and so we know it was made between 1450-1670.
What was it worn for? Well, here's a mystery, Howarth explains. Whatever tradition it belonged to has long since been discontinued, so we can only guess it was for public festivities or ritual events. The mask is so very hair-raising (seen in semi-darkness by the light of flickering torches it would have been quite a horror) that Howarth can imagine it possibly being worn to try to protect the living from the spirits of the dead, that is, to send chills up the ectoplasmic spines of ghosts.
And we must imagine it, he urges, as part of ''a total costume of some sort worn to make the wearer look larger than life, to obscure the performer, to achieve the suspension of reality, to say: 'Here is a spirit from another world'''.
And, Howarth invites, just think of the effort, the craftsmanship that went into making such an object. The wood is very dense and the craftsman had no metal tools. He might have used an adze or a sturdy clam shell for any hacking and hewing.
''Then for all the fine detail he may have used rats' teeth [as tiny chisels]. You should try working with rats' teeth, Ian. It must have been laborious, requiring lots of patience and vision.
''Then, to make things smooth and because he didn't have sandpaper, he would have used the rough skin of a ray or a shark.''
The mask has just gone on discreet display at the gallery but Howarth says it will have particular ''pride of place'' when from February next year, in an exhibition with the working title Arts of Vanuatu, the Gallery at last gets a chance to show its whole rich collection of treasures from Vanuatu.
