Wa ke mia Dan ceremonial spoon, Ivory Coast - Lot 25

Lot n° 25
Go to lot
Estimation :
2200 - 3000 EUR
Wa ke mia Dan ceremonial spoon, Ivory Coast - Lot 25
Wa ke mia Dan ceremonial spoon, Ivory Coast Wood, pigments H. 50.5 cm Bibliography: *Segalen, Martine. "10 - Les cuillères, un genre humain ?", Élisabeth Anstett ed, Les objets ont-ils un genre ? Material culture and the social production of gendered identities. Armand Colin, 2012. Bernard de Grunne, Hans Himmelheber, Eberhard Fischer, Dancing with spoons Dan. Dancing with spoons, 2019. In Dan country, hospitality is embodied in monumental "spoon-women" celebrating the wunkirle, the most generous woman in a community. Moving away from the classical stylistic canons and more traditional representations of the corpus, which naturalistically depict the feminine curves of the buttocks and calves, the sculptor who created this wa ke mia favoured geometrisation, the refined schematisation of forms, thus creating a singular work. The large spoon, a metaphor for the fertile, nurturing woman, with its regular oval shape, evokes the "rice-encrusted belly of the spirit of the spoon". Extending the receptacle, the handle is sculpted with a body of stylized volumes, exalting the inventiveness of the sculptural gesture. From the straight, rectangular bust emerge short, horizontally-stretched arms; the marked waist is represented by a ring with ribbed decoration; the arched legs almost meet at the ends, forming a perfect circle. The features are superbly emphasized by herringbone friezes, magnifying the roundness of the legs and the hieratic nature of the bust. These anthropomorphic creations are unique. "Nowhere have spoons reached such a high artistic form as in Africa, deliberately associating the object with the woman. While the realism of some spoons - notably those with a human head on the end - goes so far as to reproduce the face of the wunkirle for whom it was carved, our object, with its formal abstraction, has a more universal dimension.
My orders
Sale information
Sales conditions
Return to catalogue