Ticuna figures dressed in yanchama bark cloth. Each dress is cut from a different tree.

Yanchama is a cloth made from the inner bark of the yanchama tree (Poulsenia armata), a member of the fig family that grows across the Colombian Amazon. The Ticuna people soak, pound, and dry this bark until it turns flexible and textile-like, then cut it to dress their ceremonial figures. It is the material that gives a Ticuna figure its particular look: a matte, fibrous drape that no woven fabric can imitate. Most collectors meet yanchama without ever learning its name. Here is the material itself: the tree it comes from, the preparation that turns bark into fabric, and the reason the Ticuna chose bark over cloth.

What is yanchama made from?

Yanchama comes from Poulsenia armata, a rainforest tree in the fig family. The usable part is the inner bark, the living layer between the outer bark and the wood, which is built from long interlaced fibers. Beaten flat, those fibers hold together as a sheet. That is the whole trick of barkcloth, and cultures across the tropics discovered it independently: the Pacific has tapa, beaten from paper mulberry, and the Amazon has yanchama.

No two sections of bark are alike. The color runs from pale cream to deep tobacco, and the texture ranges from nearly smooth to visibly ropy, depending on the tree, the season, and the hands doing the pounding. This is why every Ticuna figure is one of a kind before any paint touches it. The dress is as unrepeatable as a fingerprint.

How yanchama bark cloth is made

The preparation has three stages. The harvested bark is soaked to loosen the fiber. It is then pounded, patiently and evenly, until the sheet spreads thin and gains the flexibility of textile. Finally it is dried. What comes off the drying line behaves like a heavy natural cloth: it can be cut with a knife, fitted, wrapped, and layered.

For a ceremonial figure, the yanchama is cut and fitted to dress the carved form, the way a tailor fits a garment. On the figures RFB Woven Art carries, you can see this in the seams and overlaps of the dress, each one shaped to its own figure. Within the Pelazón tradition, yanchama is also the material of ceremonial dress itself: at the Fiesta de la Pelazón, participants wear traditional outfits made from yanchama painted with geometric symbols, which is part of why the figures wear bark rather than fabric. The dress is the ceremony's own material, scaled down.

Bark on its way to becoming cloth: soaked, pounded, dried.

Balsa wood and the four-color palette

The figure under the dress is balsa (Ochroma pyramidale), one of the lightest workable woods in the world and a traditional carving wood of Amazon craft. Balsa is harvested from the rainforest and carved by hand with traditional tools, its form determined by the spirit or animal the figure embodies.

Everything starts as a tree. The bark comes off first; the carving follows.

Over the bark cloth go the pigments. Every authentic Ticuna figure is painted in the same four-color palette: black, red, white, and yellow, drawn from seeds, plant extracts, minerals, and roots of the Colombian Amazon. The region's best-known dye plants, achiote (Bixa orellana) for red and jagua (Genipa americana) for blue-black, belong to this same rainforest palette. The geometric motifs painted in these four colors are not decoration. They are a symbolic language within Ticuna cosmology, and the four colors are one of the fastest authenticity checks a collector has.

What about chambira palm?

Ask about Amazon weaving and one name comes up before any other: chambira. Chambira (Astrocaryum chambira) is a fiercely spiny palm whose young leaf shoots are stripped, dried, and rolled into cordage. Across the northwest Amazon, including the Ticuna communities around Leticia, that cordage becomes hammocks, carrying bags, and net bags of remarkable strength. It is the region's great utility fiber, and it is often the first material a visitor to the Colombian Amazon handles.

But chambira is not what Ticuna ceremonial figures are made of. The figures are balsa and yanchama. The two materials solve different problems: chambira is spun into cord and knotted or woven for objects that carry weight, while yanchama is beaten into flat cloth for objects that are dressed. If you are holding a twisted-fiber bag from Leticia, that is chambira. If you are looking at the bark-cloth dress on a pucuna figure, that is yanchama. Knowing the difference puts you ahead of most of the market, which files both under "natural fiber" and moves on.

Who works these materials today

The Ticuna are one of the largest Indigenous groups in the Amazon, living across the tri-border region where Colombia, Peru, and Brazil meet, an area known as the Amazonian Trapezium. Historically the figures were made exclusively by men; today both men and women make them, which is part of why the tradition is still alive rather than archival.

The painter behind many of the figures in the RFB collection is Angel Custodio de la Piedra del Águila, a Ticuna doll painter in the Colombian Amazon. His workshop is a family business in the plainest sense: Angel paints, his brother handles the carpentry, and his wife prepares and fits the yanchama dresses. Other Ticuna families still make figures the older, more rustic way for community use. Angel's contribution is the painting itself, bringing new animals into the repertoire and carrying the figures to collectors without losing the ceremony behind them. I learned his name through Magno, our partner in Colombia, after a buyer asked who painted the dolls. That is the scale this tradition operates at: family workshops, known names, no factories.

Angel Custodio with a jaguar mask and a hummingbird figure: new animals in an old form.

Jennifer Kuyper sources Ticuna figures for RFB Woven Art directly from the artisans and through their cooperative and tribal representatives in the Colombian Amazon, so each piece arrives with its story intact: which animal or spirit it represents, who made it, and what ceremony it belongs to. Every partner RFB works with earns the relationship the same way, by what the work does for the people who make it, and each figure is purchased at a fair price that supports Angel's family workshop and the continuation of the tradition. The weaver is the first person paid, not the last. For the ceremony behind the figures, the Pelazón, read the full explainer on Ticuna ceremonial dolls.