Seyni Awa Camara

Celebrating eight decades of Camara's visionary totemic sculptures that visualize motifs of motherhood and ancestry

Gathering select works completed between 1990 and 2022, this volume showcases the octogenarian Senegalese ceramicist Seyni Awa Camara's (born 1939) totemic sculptures. Evoking subjects ranging from bestiaries to motor vehicles and maternity scenes, Camara's sculptural forms are divined from her dreams. After preparing her clay, sometimes adding ore or other natural mediums to the mixture, the artist carves the complex forms appearing in each work. Camara then fires the clay on a wooden pyre before immersing it in a liquid obtained from putrefied tree pods, lending the sculptures their color and robust, textured quality.
Alongside installation shots and artwork images, this volume features both a new essay by curator, writer and art historian Eva Barois de Caevel, as well as an old text by Louise Bourgeois, originally published in the 1996 book Contemporary Art of Africa.