Seyni Awa Camara

Born c. 1945, Bignona, Senegal
Lives and works in Bignona, Senegal

Seyni Awa Camara grew up alongside her mother, herself a potter, who introduced her to sculpture from early childhood. She has twin brothers, and the three of them once vanished into the Casamance forest following a mysterious divine initiation: “We were hidden by the spirits of God; they taught us how to work the earth.” Seyni shapes clay to give form to stories, events, and emotions—dreamed, revealed, or imagined.

For about thirty years, Seyni Camara has produced an extraordinary number of sculptures. She arranges them by size inside her home, which has become the backstage of a theater filled with objects and figures without a stage—an exact reflection of her vision of a world populated by beings both good and evil, beautiful and grotesque. Some of her works rise to nearly two meters in height. All of these creatures take shape in her yard and are solidified in an open-air fire.

She explains the distorted faces of her creations as a response to our indifference toward our ancestors. When forty tiny monsters cling to a pregnant mother, she says it is because we are all running away from something. Before revealing her “secrets,” she shuts herself away with her talisman—a cow horn—and in that moment, everything becomes possible.

When asked about her art, she answers in Wolof: “Damay science ma liguège,” which means “I reflect, I have an idea, I work.” Her thinking draws on revealed truths, timeless stories, observations of the human world, the objects around her, and her condition as a Casamance woman. Her vision is that all of this surpasses and unsettles her, and she feels compelled to bring past and present together through her work.

Collections 

The National Museum of Art Norway, Oslo, Norway

Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain, Paris, France 

Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, France