carving (art)

Soap-stone carving of pumpkin.

Community Commentary by Njeri Gachihi within research project: 'Rethinking Relationships and Building Trust with African Collections' 2021: This is an artistic impression of a pumpkin made of Kisii stone /Kisii soap stone. The peace must have been sculptured by an artist as a house ornament or a paper weight. The Kisii stone industry is a multibillion one, mined and by hand in Kisii County of Western Kenya for the local and international market. The sizes made vary in size from a few centimeters to huge life size animals weight thousands of tones. The process is a long and tedious one starting with mining of the raw material ferrying it to the workshop sculpturing the figure by hand, washing it and sometimes varnishing it. This particular object may have been made for the market.

Collection Information

These objects are only a part of our collections, of which there are more than 350,000 objects. This information comes from our collections database. Some of this is incomplete and there may be errors. This part of the website is also still under construction, so there may be some fields repeated or incorrectly formatted information.

The database sometimes uses language taken from historical documents to help research, which may now appear outdated and even offensive. The database also includes information on objects that are considered secret or sacred by some communities.

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