Seyni Awa Camara, whose totemic ceramic sculptures won her acclaim, has died.
Her work, made in unglazed clay, typically featured multiple heads or gargoyles protruding from a single body, and was based on legends, observation, objects and landscape.
The artist lived and worked in the Casamancian village of Bignona, Senegal, where she was born. Taught traditional pottery by her mother, Camara’s work quickly moved away from the utilitarian to the artistic, her compositions guided by what she termed ‘gifts’. ‘We were sheltered by God’s spirits, who taught us to work with clay’, Camara said of her and her twin brothers, also artists.
The painter Michael Armitage, who included Camara’s sculpture in his 2022 exhibition at White Cube, London, said, ‘The experience of seeing Camara’s sculptures is difficult to articulate. It is how I would imagine it would feel to meet a voiceless spirit of someone you once knew well − your imagination struggling to put a single image from your memories to the spirit yet knowing exactly who they are. In this sense there is something extremely familiar yet totally other worldly about Camara’s sculptures.’
Camara came to international prominence after curator Jean-Hubert Martin included her work in Magiciens de la Terre at the Centre Pompidou and Halle de la Villette, Paris, in 1989. She would go on to exhibition regularly, including in Harald Szeemann’s 2001 Venice Biennale and 100% Africa at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in 2007; Art/Afrique, Le nouvel atelier at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris in 2017 and Alpha Crucis – Contemporary African Art at the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo (2020).
