An eagle and a horse live in peaceful coexistence in the powerful design of this African mask. By Ghana's Rita Addo Zakour, the hand-carved sese wood mask is ornately adorned with embossed aluminum and brass. Zakour calls this mask "Fafa," meaning "Peace" in the Ewe dialect of Ghana.

Product features:

• Dimension :-22.75" H x 5.5" W x 3.1" D
• Weight :- 1.54 LBS
• Material :- Sese wood, aluminum and brass 
•  Color :-Brown 
• Made in Ghana
  
   

Story behind the art:

I am a designer by profession. I do my designing with African concepts in mind. Growing up I loved to sketch things on paper. It was a natural talent I guess. At the high school, I pursued a course in visual Arts that helped me develop my natural talent; this made my art studies enjoyable. On completing the high school, I continued at the secretarial school where the stringing of beads helped generate income to my support my education. I sold the beads to friends and students and their comments encouraged and motivated me to create more designs. I also produced more to sell to the local market. After completing the secretarial course, the beads business was very demanding. I focused my attention to grow it. I also got into the carving business as well as developing designed frames for mirrors. I started out by creating a lot of designs and employed the services of a carver to translate the design on wood. With the carved wood I started painting and adding the metal plates. I got lots of positive comments from customers. This encouraged me to continue and not give up. I am blessed to be married to a man who is also into art and craft business and a designer as well. We all use our creative abilities to design products. It's wonderful to work in such an environment where a simply design, can turn out to be a very unique product through the input by my spouse. This makes my products very unique from other artisans making similar products. I get inspirations by opening my eyes wider to see things from magazines, TV, on the streets etc. I search on youtube to develop my talent as well. The requests for my products lead us to build a workshop at home and to have proper supervision on the work. The carvers use traditional tools to carve. I check the quality of each stage with close monitoring. I employ more carvers when the demand goes up. This keeps the carvers in business. With the introduction of jewelry at Novica, women who mainly enjoy stringing beads in the neighborhood also get to make income when there is increase in demand. This couldn't have been possible without good sales from my business. I use mainly wood, recycled aluminum sheets, recycled plastic beads for my production. These are materials I can easily get on the local market. I sometime have some of the young men in the community showing interest in learning how to carve, they come around to observe. I allow this because it is possible one or two carvers who show keen interest can get a career out of this. The local women also have constant supply of scraps for fire wood for cooking. I'm proud to say that on few occasions I have chipped in financially to help a couple of children in my neighborhood. Such children see me as their second mother and it is a joy to put a smile on the faces. Away from work, I love to be with my family and cooking for them. It is such joy having three young ladies at home. With their love for fashion, they help out with stringing the jewelry, sharing their opinions on my designs and also suggesting color combination for some of the jewelries. My beautiful twins are so, much interested in the jewelry.