Artist description
Grassfields masks come out as companies, the way a household comes out to a funeral: in order, each one knowing its place. Ngoin is the woman among them. She does not dance alone and she does not dance fast — she moves with the male masks at the funerals of notables and at royal ceremonies, and her presence is what makes the company a family rather than a crowd of men. One correction I always insist on, because catalogues get it wrong: ngoin is a mask, mafo is a living queen mother. Not the same word, not the same thing.
The beadwork is the commission. Trade glass, absorbed whole into a court's own grammar, and if you follow the band from temple to jaw you will find small stutters in the rhythm where a beader picked up a new thread. That is a signature, not a fault. Kaolin gives her the pale face of the ancestors and of matters settled without blood. The cane arch beneath the crest has been pulled tight more than once, which is my plainest proof she was still in service when she left home.
