Have one like this?
Upload a photo for a free check of what yours may be worth.
Lot description
Seyni Awa CAMARA (Casamance, 1945-2026) Terracotta H : 179 cm Soclée. Restoration to right foot *** Fired clay, on base, 70½ in. high Provenance : Private collection, France. Acquired from M.Correia, Zinguichor, 2015. A veritable vertical totem, this eagle-stacked sculpture embodies a powerful form of Seyni Awa Camara's plastic vocabulary. Revealed to the international public at the Magiciens de la Terre exhibition, the artist has developed a deeply inhabited body of work, nourished by an initiatory experience in the sacred forest of Casamance. Trained in pottery by her mother from a very early age, she refers to her sculptures as her "little monsters": each one is preceded by a period of retreat where, in her words, "everything becomes possible". The figure of the eagle - a symbol of height and movement between worlds - lends the work an upward dynamic. The stacking of forms builds an axis between the earthly and the celestial, in a permanent tension between anchorage and elevation. Shaped in clay and fired in the open air, the sculpture retains the raw strength of the material: stylized and expressive, the forms participate in a language where repetition and variation make sense. Seyni Awa Camara was born in the village of Bignona, in Casamance, southern Senegal, where she still lives and works today. She expresses her extravagance, her fantasies and the "evil spirits" that animate her in her enigmatic half-men, half-women, half-monsters, giving birth to mischievous, cheeky offspring. In her work, the mystical rubs shoulders with the profane, the real with the imaginary. She models in the earth: tenderness, the mother's smile, the roughness of the material, the beings of the forest, trucks where the woman holds the steering wheel, animals of the bush, or cars with wheels in the shape of flowers. She scoffs at standards and gives free rein to her imagination. She bakes her creatures, erotic sculptures and other monsters in a very rudimentary kiln, a simple hole dug in front of her house. She is currently considered Africa's foremost "art brut" potter.