Mama Chupa

Mama Chupa is very much a real person. She helped at my wife's birth in her capacity as family friend and retainer to my wife's family in Uganda . She was one of the first heads I did in clay – she came to stay with us for a week and we talked a lot about the respective merits and size of the Indian Ocean and Lake Victoria where she comes from originally. Chupa means bottle in Kiswahili and she got here name in Kenya from selling bottles for medicine outside the Coast General Hospital in Mombasa . She did this for more than thirty years until the city council demolished her kiosk and looted her belongings. Noone knows how old she is. She has been the foster mother to two girls – never had children of her own and is known all over Mombasa as a kind if somewhat dotty old lady. I hope you can see what an extraordinary person she is from my sculpture. I have never met anyone like her, so dignified, so funny, so generous, so rich in spirit.
I consider it a great privilege to have known her and
I hope this comes across in my sculpture.