This was my first Fulani sculpture I worked on. Huge, of course. lol. I’m trying to work on scaling down. I’ve gotten a lot better. Anywho, Fulani culture is just one of the most beautiful I’ve seen. The clothing, the detail of their jewelry, the hairstyles…etc. Stunning! So I was like, let me try and make the image I have in my mind, come to life. And I did. It was gorgeous. The features, the jewelry, the hair all came out the way that I wanted. It was massive. Now mind you, this was one of my first large pieces and I still was learning about weight distribution and shrinkage, basically all the things that could go wrong…did. The base, although thick was not constructed well enough to handle the density of the head. I started to see cracking at the base. I fixed the cracked as they came up, but they kept happening. So the cone form I had it setting on, I removed it so that the maybe the cracking would be alleviated, due to shrinkage around the metal form. It worked for the moment. Then I went to debulk the head. I was almost in tears, because as I was cutting the pieces, they were falling apart in my hands. I was like, is it the clay? Is it just not malleable enough? I somehow was able to piece the head back to together, but I made the mistake of joining the head back to the base, after just working on the base. The bas was wet and still not stable enough to handle the weight of the head. In the middle of the night I shot up, I didn’t hear anything, but I was just very aware something was wrong. She toppled. The only thing salvageable was her face, everything else was cracked or broken into too many pieces. I now know how to navigate repairs, but I also know that even though it might be painful, sometimes you have to call it. I decided to just rehydrate the clay and start over.