‘I always try to make shapes that I enjoy’ says London-based sculptor Sokari Douglas Camp.

An international artist, Douglas Camp was born in the Niger Delta, Nigeria, and has exhibited throughout the US and Europe, with theatre, movement and costume being strong themes of her work. Her shape-making statement seems modest, as she has a high sense of drama, which is deeply rooted in the sounds, dress and performance of the traditional West African Kalabari festival that has long influenced her. A riot of colour, expression and spiritual showmanship, this African tradition is one that is exclusively male. It is an area of Nigerian life where women are spectators and not participants, so it’s no small surprise that through her work, Douglas Camp unleashes her own voice through the content and narrative of her familiarly large sculptures, with the last decade in particular being a period in which her inbuilt political streak came to the fore .

Participating from the standpoint of an artist, Douglas Camp has created shapes and movement for her metal sculptures that allow them to simultaneously dominate and blend in with any given setting. The back story to many of the works, often highlights Nigeria’s relationship with oil and the subsequent impact on its citizens.

Douglas Camp’s 2006-commissioned life-size steel bus is a living memorial to executed Niger Delta activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, writer, environmentalist, and leader of the Ogoni, a community occupying Nigeria's delta region. Taking the dual form of campaigning vehicle as well as a processional celebration of a political icon, the bus is inscribed with Saro-Wiwa’s own words, ‘I accuse the oil companies of practicing genocide against the Ogoni’.

The vehicle carries Saro-Wiwa’s political sentiments wherever it travels, reminding us of the public protest against Shell Oil over a decade ago, and taking with it the traditional ghosts of campaigning politicians, barnstorming medicine men, soothsayers, pilgrims, travelling salesmen or crusading artists with its theatre of glinting steel and carved oil drums, forming a provocative remembrance piece.

The marriage of oil and weapons is portrayed in Douglas Camp’s tauntingly–named Guns Teasing Suicide. A crimson-spattered woman holds an AK47 rifle to her own mouth, while strapped with another gun on her back. The incongruity of the violence visited on a female, also leaves many questions unanswered about the constructed image, as the figure is literally left faceless by an act that may or may not be self-inflicted.

The scrabble for fuel that’s shackled the Niger Delta is no doubt a concern for Douglas Camp – and one that’s spilled over to her interpretation of the War in Iraq. Both Africa and the Middle East seem to have provided her with humanistic food for thought in creating her sculptures. Having courted some controversy for her Bin Laden Pieta, her particular take on religious imagery in this case seems to provide a snapshot of a moment in time with a visual adaptation that sees the Virgin Mary substituted for a woman in a burkha, and the expected Jesus in repose, now taking the form of a framed image of the burning Twin Towers. How to read this? The recurring 9/11 image nestling in the crook of the female figure’s protective arms captures a gut feeling that affected Douglas Camp at the time.

‘It’s a maternal picture’, she explains. ‘She’s carrying something bigger than herself’. There’s perhaps something here that mirrors the pink-smattered figure who clutches the gun in the ‘teasing suicide’ sculpture.

However, despite the politics, there is a separate and more personal layer of activism that rumbles within Douglas Camp. Although the presence of violence has stood out in some of her work, the fact that she has been working in the UK for over 25 years has asserted in her, a clear aesthetic expression of a spirit that lives in two places – Nigeria and the UK.

Douglas Camp: ‘People are forever telling me what I am. As an African in England you can get riled into talking up; even if it’s not in your character to do so. My work has totally been informed by living in England. I am what I am because I live here’.

Her Brit Flag is a piece in point. A large Perspex Union Jack, held aloft by what looks to be a self-sculpture, it was created during the height of the Britpop era of the 1990s. An early work, it was made during her time of becoming a British citizen, when ‘Cool Britannia’ sound bites tripped off the tongues of the UK press, or anyone else who was talking, when the Spice Girls were running rings round the media, and sportspeople like Denise Lewis were held up as icons of dual heritage. It was a glorious mish-mash of celebratory cultural inspiration that had a magical juju element going right to the core of Douglas Camp’s creative sensibilities.

‘I saw all of this as a celebration of ourselves’, she says. ‘It made me look at myself and re-assess what I’ve been given. There are certain ideas that I have in art and aesthetics. I do have various stories going on in my head because of my heritage and the love I have for various themes, like masquerades’.

This last statement speaks volumes about the inspiration behind Douglas Camp’s work. Much driven by the aesthetics of the human body and how it can be shaped to exude drama and performance, she also acknowledges the traces of danger in her pieces.

Douglas Camp: ‘There is quite a lot of violence in my work, but I’m also happy to focus on beautiful things, and to target beautiful moments, particularly West African images and colour within the grey London landscape’.

Nigeria is never far from her vision. ‘I see its shadows in London life,’ she says. ‘Women in full African attire drifting through the city’.

The beauty of West African theatre and its concept of possession are key to Douglas Camp’s huge sculptures. They harness a belief not what in the person is, but in who’s come to visit. Using realms of the imagination, she can take her audience on a powerful trip that flows with the full dramatic spectrum of the theatre.

‘I like making giants’ she says. ‘I like the fact that you can dive in and adjust every movement you attach to the figure, making them very tactile and physical’.

An early decision to use steel in her work was key. It has become her cloth, due to its versatility.

‘It can be used like jewellery’, she says. ‘It’s tactile. It’s light. I like the fact that you can drill holes through it and curve or bend it to your will’.

There is something delightfully sensual about Douglas Camp’s pieces; even humorous. Changing the character of her figures by using constructed costumes and making the structures stand at exaggerated heights is obviously satisfying.

‘I never felt the same interest from drawing nudes,’ she says. ‘My figures are twice the height they should be, and there are so many shapes – pregnant stomachs, breasts on a man...’

The otherworldly essence of her work keeps her very much linked to Nigeria and her hard Kalabari wiring, and although there may be underlying themes of conflict woven into some of the themes of her work, with knives, guns and blood creeping into the masquerade, there is also empathy, humour and beauty, particularly in works like the Paisley King and Queen who regally emanate life while swathed in the artists’ constructed fabric of pomegranate-shaped symbols that seem to straddle the styles of the psychedelic Paisley pattern and the tie and dye Yoruba adire cloth.

Nana Ocran