Seyni Awa CAMARA (Casamance, circa 1945) Maternity, 1990

Lot description

Seyni Awa CAMARA (Casamance, circa 1945) Maternity, 1990 Terracota 29 x 15 cm Provenance: Collection J. Lassaque, acquired directly from the artist in the 1990s. This work embodies the singular universe of Seyni Awa Camara, a self-taught sculptor from Casamance. Trained by her potter mother, the artist claims to have received her gifts following an initiatory disappearance into the forest, where she and her brothers were instructed by the genies of God. This seminal experience informs all her work. Camara works without sketches or outlines, modelling directly from clay, which she then fires in the open air. Her works draw on cosmogonic imaginary worlds, animist beliefs and collective narratives. They also reflect a strong social and feminine conscience through her maternity figures. The sculpture presented here, like many of her "surrogate mother" figures, illustrates both the power of nurturing and the weight of responsibility. The deliberate deformity of the faces - a "response to indifference towards our ancestors" according to the artist. Human-animal hybridization, a recurrent theme in her work, refers to a cosmogony in which the boundaries between species are porous. Seyni Camara's work is profoundly driven by a revealed logic, between personal myth and collective memory, in which the body becomes the medium of "dreamed, revealed or fantasized" stories. Born in 1945 in Casamance (Senegal), Seyni Awa Camara is a self-taught sculptor renowned for her work in clay, modeled and fired in the open air. Trained in modelling by her potter mother, from the 1970s onwards she developed a singular plastic language based on intuitive production, without prior drawing. Her work is mainly inhabited by figures of maternity, fertility and multiple communities, often characterized by expressive faces, hypertrophied bodies and dense compositions evoking the social and symbolic charge of maternity. Present at several major exhibitions of contemporary African art, Camara gained international recognition in the 1980s. Her works are held in public and private collections, including the Musée du quai Branly. His work is often interpreted in the light of the region's animist beliefs, integrating totemic references, human-animal hybridization and local symbolic systems. This mythological dimension is regularly commented on in critical literature devoted to the Casamance School. Today considered a major figure in contemporary African sculpture, Seyni Awa Camara continues to work in her home village, where she continues to fashion, in her own words, forms "revealed" by guided intuition.