Sokari Douglas Camp

Biography

A steel oil barrel is split in two, and out of it a woman god is making greenery grow. The 2014 sculpture is called “Green Leaf Barrel”. It was prompted by the Niger Delta, where jobs are few and pollution is heavy. Sokari Douglas Camp herself explained that this time she wanted to talk about the positive: there is so much that is bad there that it already takes up almost the whole conversation.

The Niger Delta is her home.

She was born in 1958 in Buguma, a Kalabari town in the delta. She studied art first in California, at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland (1979–1980), then in London: in 1980–1983 she took her BA at the Central School of Art and Design, and in 1983–1986 her MA at the Royal College of Art. Her student years also brought her first awards: the Amy Sadur Friedlander Prize in 1981, the Saatchi & Saatchi Award in 1982, and in 1983 the Princess of Wales Scholarship and a bursary from the Henry Moore Foundation. Her first solo exhibition, “Alali”, was held in 1985 at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham; that same year her work was shown at the South Bank Centre in London, and in 1986 at the Whitechapel Gallery. In 1988 the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African Art in Washington mounted her exhibition “Echoes of the Kalabari”. In 1989 she took part in the Pachipamwe II workshop at Cyrene Mission near Bulawayo in Zimbabwe, together with Joram Mariga, Bernard Matemera and David Koloane.

She works mainly in steel. This steel draws on three sources: her Kalabari heritage, the cultures of Nigeria and her own life in Britain. In 1995 the Museum of Mankind in London showed her exhibition “Play and Display”, and in 1998–1999 the American Museum of Natural History in New York showed “Spirits in Steel: The Art of the Kalabari Masquerade”. The project “Imagined Steel” opened in 2002–2003 at The Lowry arts centre in Manchester and then travelled to Llandudno, Cirencester and Derby. In 2005, for the Africa 05 festival, she worked with the gardening television programme Ground Force on pieces for the Africa Garden at the British Museum. I think Kalabari masquerade runs through her whole career, from the Washington exhibition of 1988 to the London one of 2022.

Much of her work has been made for public space and for remembrance. In 2003 her proposal “NO-O-War No-O-War-R” was shortlisted for the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square. Her best-known memorial is “Battle Bus” (2006), a “living memorial” to Ken Saro-Wiwa. In 2012 her sculpture commemorating the victims of the slave trade, “All the World is Now Richer”, was exhibited in the House of Commons. In 2015 Douglas Camp’s work was included in the exhibition “No Colour Bar: Black British Art in Action 1960–1990” at the Guildhall Art Gallery in London. In 2016 the October Gallery showed her “Primavera”, and in 2022 the same gallery held her solo exhibition “Jonkonnu: Masquerade”, with new work on masquerade in Africa and the African diaspora.

Her exhibitions have taken place in Austria, Britain, Germany, Spain, Cuba, the Netherlands, the United States, Sicily, France, South Africa and Japan, and her works are held in museums in Europe, Britain and Japan and in private collections. In 2005 she was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire, in 2006 an Honorary Fellow of the University of the Arts London, in 2008 she joined its board of governors, and in 2017 she became an Honorary Fellow of SOAS, University of London. A photographic portrait of her by Sal Idriss (2006) is in the National Portrait Gallery, and a terracotta head of 2009 was shown in 2013 at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in a series of portraits of contributors to British sculpture.