ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, December 17, 1995 TAG: 9512150031
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 12 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: LONDON
SOURCE: KARIN DAVIES ASSOCIATED PRESS
Okolokurukuru Opu-Owu, a steel sculpture inspired by Nigerian dancers, wields two cutlasses, his white-painted apron splattered with the blood of a sacrifice.
His featureless head is festooned with feather dusters and topped with a model of a Kalabari boat painted zingy blue. The color comes from a packet of imported Robin Ultramarine Blue, a laundry whitener.
Big Masquerade, named in deference to his size as well as his ferocity and spiritual power, is one of eight steel-and-wood sculptures by Sokari Douglas Camp exhibited at London's Museum of Mankind for Africa 95, a celebration of African arts.
Douglas Camp, 36, drew on childhood memories of the mangrove swamps of southern Nigeria - the bright costumes of Kalabari dancers, boats, fish and birds - for her affectionately irreverent sculptures that seem poised to kick up their wooden feet and dance to the drums.
The exotic figures are modeled on masqueraders who mimic water spirits in a 17-year cycle of plays performed by the Kalabari of the South Niger Delta.
There's Otobo, a hippopotamus with flaring nostrils and a garish necklace of river grass; a flying fish with bubbles; a dandy with a fringed vest decorated with mirrors.
Seki Owu, which translates as the Dancing Masquerade, imitates a dancer hopping to shake his noisy anklets of nutshells. Two fish atop his head are wrapped in metal mesh suggesting both fish scales and netting.
Iriabo, the Woman in Her Prime Masquerade, wears an elaborate crown-like headdress. Her hips are padded to emphasize the rolling, billowing movement of her dance as she moves through a crowd with her stick and dish collecting offerings.
Douglas Camp's interpretations of the traditional figures violated a taboo: Kalabari women are discouraged from making images because of a belief their fertility will be ruined. Yet female spirits are represented, usually by men, as in Elizabethan theater where boys played women.
In such a world, Douglas Camp is both insider and outsider, questioning traditional assumptions about African art and revealing it anew.
``I hope I am not offending the gods,'' said the woman whose name, Sokari, means ``gift from God.''
Douglas Camp was born in Buguma, the principal settlement of the Kalabari people. As a child, she went to the mangrove swamp to cut firewood, gather shellfish and set fish traps. At festival times, she would sit with other children on the dusty ground and revel in being frightened by the masqueraders.
At age 8 she was sent to boarding school in Devon, England, by the brother-in-law who raised her, anthropologist Robin Horton.
``In England, I was very aware that I didn't have thin lips, blue eyes, blond hair,'' Douglas Camp said. But Horton ``taught me to value the things that were different about my culture.''
Today she is equally comfortable swaddled in Nigerian clothes or slouching in sweat pants. She has a soft voice but a raucous laugh, an English accent that lilts with African cadences.
Beginning the masquerade project, Douglas Camp retrieved masks from Buguma and rescued others from the British Museum's storage boxes, then set about enlivening them with the drama of the dance, the drumming, the color that she saw on visits to her native Delta.
As she worked in her bright, airy home and studio in south London, Douglas Camp said she became intrigued with modern masks by Minabo Harry, which incorporated ordinary materials - gold foil from cigarette packages, feather dusters, painted cardboard, buttons.
``All sorts of wonderful tacky things that you just wouldn't normally have on sculptures. I thought, well, this is what I need to actually freshen up my work. I think that when you're just so conscious of making money and using durable materials, things become rather dull,'' Douglas Camp said.
Working with steel is like drawing, she said.
``You don't even have to worry about color too much because the material is so complete that it gets textured by the heat. You can put a color on top of it, you can spray things on it, tangle up things, make them look like feathers, or fabric,'' Douglas Camp said.
Although made in metal, the patterned weave of the native pelete cloth is suggested by the open basket-work structure of Piko Piko, the Bird Masquerade.
Critic Sue Hubbard admires Douglas Camp's dual perspective as an African living in a Western country.
``There is nothing dour or over-reverential about these works, but rather an affectionate humor characterized in the large `rolling pin' breasts of the Gelede Masquerade. It is this gentle amused observation, fused with the Western eye, that is the strength of Sokari Douglas Camp's work,'' Hubbard wrote in an exhibition guide.
Douglas Camp insisted that her masks be displayed on the floor or atop the sculpture's head, ``God's perspective, not gallery perspective. A mask is meant to have a conversation with God.''
She is offended by Westerners who hang disembodied masks on their drawing-room walls, comparing it to being obsessed by the shoes of Queen Elizabeth II rather than seeing them as part of her total regalia as monarch.
``It's taking African art out of context. It's arrogant,'' she said.
LENGTH: Medium: 95 linesby CNB