Searching for Kouame Kakaha: A celebration of the unnamed women of clay; our shared mothers and grandmothers

In January 2020, I started a project I titled Baney Clay: An Unearthed Identity, which was both an exploration of my own identity as a mixed-race Spanish woman and an opportunity for me to challenge the Western and colonialist views that have historically dominated the way we look at Art, Crafts and History.

It was the first time that I was hand-building (since I started making in 2013 I had mostly thrown), as well as my first project to incorporate more research, a clearer concept and writing.  

The pieces in themselves were not important. They were merely a canvas for me to tell a story, which was the key part of the project: my story. Since I couldn’t find anything about pottery in Equatorial Guinea (where my Dad and one of the clays I used are from), I looked at other African traditions: Cameroon, Nigeria, Chad, Ivory Coast… in search for the shapes that would best work with the concept. And so, I decided to use a universal shape like a moon-jar vessel - which I called Womb Vessel in relation to the idea of birth, home and identity - and a two-legged vessel, which was perfect to reflect how I feel: a conjunction of two legs, two parents, two cultures, two races, that combine and birth something new.

But there were two things I did not know.

Firstly, that the two-legged vessels would be very popular and lots of people would get in touch to buy them and ask for more.

And secondly, that the two pieces I had replicated were not exactly what I had thought. And what had I thought? Well, when one looks at African pottery, the pieces generally belong to a tribe or to a village and, therefore, there isn’t an individual behind them. They are nameless. And that’s what I assumed when I saw the only two pictures available online of those pieces, which I hadn’t come across in books. In books I had only seen other multi-legged vessels like the ones you can also find in the British Museum. 

In November, once I was coming out of the Black Lives Matter tsunami in which I had been immersed and which had translated into a lot of visibility online, interviews and orders, I was thinking about how I could keep developing the Baney Clay project. I decided to look at the pieces again. This time around I realised that my assumptions were wrong and there actually is a name behind those pieces: Kouame Kakaha. A woman potter born Tanoh Sakassou in Ivory Coast, ca. 1960. To my surprise, those pieces had been made around 1995, which meant that she could still be alive!

I felt terrible. Like a traitor and a liar. I had betrayed another woman, a fellow potter, a sister. How on earth had I missed that in the first place?! 

But that’s life and that was what had to happen. After sharing my frustration with a friend, also a feminist and a ceramicist and an anthropologist, we thought: why don’t I try to find her?

This is how Searching for Kouame Kakaha: A celebration of the unnamed women of clay; our shared mothers and grandmothers was born.

The subtitle is inspired by Alice Walker’s book In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, which I was reading while all these revelations were taking place and which - partly - is an invitation to black women artists to celebrate the unnamed women artists, the mothers whose day-to-day tasks were pure art but no-one saw it. They were quilting, cooking, gardening… That’s where the essence of life and our shared existence lies.

And that’s what I want to do with this new project: try to find this sister, this mother, and celebrate her work and her story which is that of infinite other women throughout History.

Another reason why I want to do this is because I find that in the UK, African pottery is only valued when it is connected to the UK. For example, Ladi Kwali (on the picture on the left) of whom we know about because Michael Cardew brought her to the UK, thus elevating her work beyond Kwali, her home village in Nigeria (you can listen to Magdalene Odundo telling her story on Frieze’s Bow Down Podcast). As a result, her work is pretty much the only example of African ceramics one can find in the Ceramics Rooms in the V&A.

Shameless.

Thus, I want to do whatever little I can to keep giving visibility to what I believe deserves it. African pottery, especially if made by women, has traditionally been belittled and ignored. Just pots for the home that could never be art or given value under our judgmental Western gaze. I disagree and I have now found the perfect project to unite all my passions: feminism, activism, history and ceramics. 

So after all I am thankful I didn’t realise that Kouame was behind those pieces back in January 2020, because I probably would have decided not to focus on them and I wouldn’t be here now.

While I try to discover if she is alive and hopefully get in touch with her (!!), I will make a new body of work that will represent that journey from her work to my own. 

More coming soon!

I recorded myself introducing the project for Award2021 from the British Ceramics Biennial. If you want to know more about the pieces I will be making, have a look!