Sokari Douglas Camp: Sensational Steel

This monograph examines the ongoing career of the internationally recognised Kalabari-British artist, Sokari Douglas Camp, from her earliest documented undergraduate works of the 1980s through more than four decades of prolific sculptural production. It describes her recursive explorations of subjects engaged in masquerade performance, costumed display, spiritual activity, danced movement, and protesting violence, pollution, and racial injustice. These diverse themes are consistently informed by her viewpoint as a contemporary, cosmopolitan, African woman. Significant personal and environmental influences are brought out in discussions of the selected works; more than eighty colour figures, many never before published, illustrate the text. Douglas Camp's name is well-known in the Black British and International arts worlds, but the attention paid her sculpture has swelled and receded episodically: this is the first publication to consider the complexity of her career and suggest reasons for the fluctuations in its reception.