Amara Osei brought an unfinished cast to the salon — still rough at the seams, not yet the smooth ancestor-stranger figures her collectors know. She walked the room through the loss of wax that happens before bronze exists at all, and how much of the final work is actually decided in a version nobody keeps.
Dr. Ijeoma Chukwu, an art historian specialising in West African bronze traditions, drew the evening’s throughline: that casting has always been as much a genealogical act as a technical one. The conversation ran long past the planned hour, most of it circling back to a single question — whose hands does a finished piece actually belong to?
“A bronze figure remembers every hand that shaped its mould.”