Figure: Mother and Child

Dogon peoples

Not on view

This visual tribute to motherhood may have been conceived as a prayer for new life directed to familial ancestors. The Dogon master sculptor charged with its creation for an altar used a single cylindrical block of wood as his point of departure. The contours of the female figure emerge from that solid mass and are defined by pronounced angles. At the summit the exactingly defined arrangement of her hair in carefully plaited sections is an attribute of elegant refinement. At the very center of the composition the form of the child diagonally spans the vertical axis of its mother. Their seamless interconnection is apparent in the fluid integration of the infant that appears as one of its parent’s bodily appendages.　 The precious life that she nurtures is at once protectively shielded and lyrically folded within the recesses of her corporeal being.

Figure: Mother and Child, Wood, Dogon peoples

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Figure: Mother and Child, Wood, Dogon peoples
Figure: Mother and Child, Wood, Dogon peoples
Figure: Mother and Child, Wood, Dogon peoples
Figure: Mother and Child, Wood, Dogon peoples
Figure: Mother and Child, Wood, Dogon peoples
Figure: Mother and Child, Wood, Dogon peoples
Figure: Mother and Child, Wood, Dogon peoples
Figure: Mother and Child, Wood, Dogon peoples
Figure: Mother and Child, Wood, Dogon peoples

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