Sokari Douglas Camp CBE

1:54 offers a number of us a privileged opportunity to remind ourselves what an important and accomplished sculptor Sokari Douglas Camp is. Working from her studio, she has, over the course of a number of decades, produced a vast and compelling body of work, for the most part characterised by her large figurative metal sculptures.  Born in Rivers State, Nigeria, and educated at art schools in California and London, Douglas Camp has been able to convincingly and with great cultural dexterity, make work that reflects not only the richness of her particular cultural heritage, but simultaneously embraces no end of references to the wider world around her.

By the mid 1980s, Douglas Camp had emerged as a bold new presence in London, making a new and decidedly different kind of work. Her sculptures, when exhibited or displayed in galleries or public spaces, demand to be seen (and in many instances, demand to be heard) and forcefully require our attention. Her work boldly announces its presence, by the space it occupies. Simply put, indifference is not an option when faced with the work of this extraordinary artist. Her sculptures are characterised by a formidable sense of presence. Gradually, over time, Douglas Camp’s work came to strikingly embrace many aspects of history and events in the wider cultural, social and political arena that have given her work renewed relevance to its audiences. Her sculptures have frequently evoked the substantial frames of formidable African matriarchs. These sculptures pay particular homage to women whose fortitude, resilience, creativity, and indeed vulnerability, have frequently gone unremarked. In recent years Douglas Camp has dramatically renewed her interest in the lives and histories of the men, women and children of Africa and its Diaspora, whose existence has not only gone unremarked, but whose stories of survival have seldom been told.

The formidable group of figures All the world is now richer 2010 that Douglas Camp made around the time of heightened reflection on the passing of the parliamentary bill to abolish the slave trade is a compelling case in point. Each of these dramatic figures represented or symbolised an individual caught up in highly charged narratives of the slave trade, slavery, abolition, emancipation, and the making of the African Diaspora. Each of these figures simultaneously came to represent different phases of history, the movement of peoples, survival, resilience and the triumph of the human spirit in the face of profound adversity and affliction. But these sculptures were also, in a range of ways, compelling sculptural investigations into form, shape, space and balance. In this regard, whilst we can consider this work as being culturally specific or evocative of the trauma heaped on Africa and its peoples, these considerations are interwoven with other impulses that give the work a universal application…

Notwithstanding the often-weighty subject matter she does not shy away from embracing, much of her work retains a pronounced playfulness that reflects both her impressive skills as a sculptor and her commitment to spectacle. It is a measure of her skills as a sculptor that her structurally solid pieces nevertheless evoke an infectious playfulness and vivid agility. Sometimes, her works are kinetic, and strongly evocative of movement, transport and journeying. These works simultaneously demand to be both seen and heard, as they emit their discordant yet rhythmic sounds. But Douglas Camp’s non-kinetic sculptures make similar demands on our attention as they seek to engage our various senses. In this regard, even her imposing figures of welded and manipulated steel though silent, require an engagement that goes way beyond the visual… 

The full version of the above text by Eddie Chambers was published in a brochure Sokari Douglas Camp CBE to accompany a showing of her work in her studio, organised as part of 1:54, London, Saturday 18 October 2014.