Aba House was a wonderful place to work. It is the base of Cross Cultural Collaborative, a non-profit organisation that promotes cultural exchange through the arts.

I met Aba, an American woman, through Francis Boateng, the sculptor who I went to Ghana to work with. I participated in a ceramic furniture making workshop which was taking place there while I was in Ghana. The other participants were Gigliola Caneschi, a French / Italian potter then living in Venezuela, and various Ghanaian ceramic artists and teachers. Aba had also invited me to work at her house, making my pieces for the joint exhibition Francis and I held at the end of my stay.

My work station was up on the flat roof, under a small thatched shelter to protect me and my work from the sun. From this vantage point I could watch life going on around me, and the world could watch me too. Various friends of Aba, and other local people would come up to see what I was making, and in this way I met some of the local crafts people. There was Eddie - a Kente cloth weaver from Togo. Kobbi - the percussionist and drum maker. Vicky - who tie-dyes cloth, and is a dressmaker. Salim - the cement artist, who was creating cement friezes on the walls of the building site next door. James came to the workshop to show us his ceramic sculpture he'd done as an amateur (very good), and then came to carefully watch my modelling techniques. I met lots of other people too.

At the ceramic furniture workshop we mostly made stools, in all sorts of different shapes and sizes. I had already made two, a hippo, and a leaf with a lizard crawling up its stem. They arrived still warm from Francis' kiln half way through the first morning of the workshop. My joint effort with my daughter Helen, who accompanied me on my trip, was our "hands of friendship" stool.

In the evening, when the workshop was over for the day, the surrounding people would come to see what we had been doing, and have a go themselves. The local children, the foreman from the building site next door, James, Salim, and others. Some of them were just having a bit of fun, while some of them were very serious in their attempts to make things.

When I returned to Ghana a year later, I was very pleased when James proudly told me that he had been working with Salim, learning to do cement friezes. He said that he'd been inspired by watching me making animals, and was now making cement animals too. He had decorated the water feature next door with two big crocodiles. I was happy to know I had helped a local artist to use his talents to earn money in Ghana, paid by a Ghanaian.

Francis' Bronzes

My Work (in Ghana)