Seyni Awa Camara

Seyni Awa Camara was born around 1945 in Casamance, in southern Senegal, and lived and worked all her life in the town of Bignona. Her mother was a potter, and she learned the craft of making cooking pots and water jars from her family. Her own story of how she became an artist was more mysterious: as a child, she said, she disappeared into the forest and was taught to model clay by spirits, and she continued to say that her figures came to her in dreams.

Instead of pots she made figures, modelled by hand from local clay and fired in an open fire, in the traditional way. Her subjects were family, fertility and the spirit world: mothers covered with clinging children, pregnant women, couples, twins, and beings with two or more heads or with faces growing from their bodies. Some are small; others reach more than two metres. The rough, burnt surfaces and crowded forms give them great strength.

How to look at a Camara: walk round the figure, since the clinging children and the faces that grow from the body appear on every side. The burnt surface is the record of the open fire, and the crowded forms are best read as family and spirit at once, as she herself described them. That reading is this site's own.

In 1989 the curator Jean-Hubert Martin included her work in Magiciens de la Terre at the Centre Pompidou and the Grande Halle de la Villette in Paris, and she became internationally known; because the terracottas are fragile, some were later cast in bronze. She died in Bignona on 25 January 2026, aged 81, and Senegal's Ministry of Culture confirmed her death. The inclusion in Magiciens de la Terre has been criticised since as exoticising in how it described her work. After her death she was among the artists at the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair in London in 2026, where a talk on her legacy was planned, and her work was shown at two venues as part of the 61st Venice Biennale. See the Senegalese sculptor Ousmane Sow, African pottery, African women artists and our list of Senegalese artists.