Art | Seyni Awa Camara’s Figurative Representations of Timeless Stories + Heritage

Senegalese sculptor Seyni Awa Camara’s (b. 1945) figurative ceramic art works resemble fantastical figurines and objects of worship or ritual rooted in revealed truths, timeless stories, the world of human beings and the objects that surround them, and in her heritage as a Ouolof woman with an obligation to unite past and present. Her works, with their disfigured faces, give shape to these stories, events and feelings, 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair writes. 

For Camara, these figures represent the world as she sees it, with people that are, good, bad, beautiful, or ugly. All these creatures are modeled in the yard in front of her house, and fired in an open-hearth kiln.

Raised by a potter mother, and has known the medium since childhood, Afrique Design Daily writes.

Then she knew how to free herself from the ancestral codes without denying the tradition by experimenting this matter which is the earth. Self-taught and free exploring other universes, fantastic or real Seyni Awa Camara has managed to shape its artistic identity while keeping these techniques that are part of the cultural heritage of West Africa.

Continuing to live and work in Bignonan, she belongs to the “School of Dakar” artistic movement, which appeared in Senegal during and after the country’s independence from France in 1960, Tate writes.

These artists promoted a particular African aesthetic that became known as Africanité. The school was instrumental in opening up a discourse on the arts in post-independent Senegal and on the role of the modern artist in the making of a new nation.

The following video is in Spanish, but you can glean a feel for the artist’s vast imagination.

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