BLACK BAOBAB | Sculptural Ceramic Baobab

This sculpture belongs to Sandrine Herlin's Baobabs noirs, a darker register within her wider Baobabs collection, rooted in childhood memories of Guinea-Conakry, where the baobab is the national emblem and where the artist spent part of her early years. Trained as an illustrator before turning to ceramics, Herlin builds each tree by coil and slab, techniques she keeps deliberately spontaneous so that an assumed unevenness and a living quality remain visible in the clay. 

A dense crown of dark, slender branches spreads from a single trunk, each tip flaring into a small cup from which a thin wire stem lifts a single gold-leafed sphere, held above the foliage like scattered fruit. Where the branches gather, the trunk narrows into a rough, granular collar pierced with a scatter of small round holes, then cinched by a raised band studded with short, nail-like protrusions, as if the tree had been bound. 

Materials: Stoneware, red earthenware, gold leaf.
Colours and finishes: Dark, near-black stoneware body with gilded accents on the crown.
Height (cm): 78
Weight (kg): 5