Seyni Awa Camara is the heir to a long line of potters from Basse-Casamance, Senegal. This knowledge was passed along to her by her mother, starting when Seyni was six years old. The first objects she made were everyday items to sell at market: pots, utensils, small figurines. Eventually, she created a whole bestiary borne from life experiences. After ending an unhappy first marriage, she returned to working clay and reconnected with her dream world.
Before starting a new series, working closely with her second husband and his sons, Seyni would make an offering to the earth – as if asking for permission to continue her journey in the twilight world. Her compositions register as neither quite animal nor human, unclassifiable clay beings with features like flat broad feet or bulging eyes that seem to exist in between her dreams and our world, watching.
To meet Seyni, you had to travel to the family compound in the mangrove of southern Senegal – an ecological in-between place, a place of biodiversity where the artist herself represented a kind of anchor or connector, a nourishing trunk. Today, she too has returned to the earth. A part of Seyni lives on in those who approached her world with patience and humility.
—Fatima Bintou Rassoul Sy
