"Naked Big Fish was made with a series of other sculptures for a show at the American Museum of Natural History, New York. (Spirits in Steel: the art of the Kalabari masquerade, 1999). He came about because I had done a study of some masquerade dancers called Okolokurukuru and I had made forms of their masquerades in full costume and I wanted people to know what a mask looked like when it was fully dressed and alive as it is meant to be seen. Not as it is introduced to so many people, without a body.

	Naked Big Fish, face detail

"There is a particular masquerade that has a lot on its head, it is shaped like a plane and a bird and a fish. It had additional things like figurines and little fencing as if it was the deck of a ship. I dealt with some of these elements to describe this masquerade on several occasions, but I have not got a version that competes with the actual original yet.

"Anyway Naked Big Fish came about because I wanted to undress the masqueraded and show him for what he was, a man in a costume. Since I started studying Okolokurkuru, Nigeria had been through some very bad times and I wanted to get rid of some of the things I loved tearing off some illusions and this is one of the reasons Big Fish is naked. The other reasons are that I like black men in string vests. I love that their nipples can be caught in the string. You can see that Naked Fish has a pillow to extend his belly and a tail made of a structure that looks like a wooden trap. His face is slightly exposed; all things that are discouraged in masquerade reality but something that happens during performances.

"Naked Big Fish - despite all my anger at my country's incompetence - still has an element of power aggression and majesty about him."
(Sokari Douglas Camp, letter to Brighton Museum, 5 May 2000)

More about Naked Big Fish

Naked Big Fish explores the power of transformation through the Kalabari masquerade, in which young men turn themselves into gods through their costumes, headdresses and performances. The sculpture reveals a young man in the process of dressing. Instead of emphasising the god, the sculptor concentrates on the physical changes brought about by the mask, the padding and the false pregnant belly.

Naked Big Fish is about masquerade performance, about the process of dressing and transforming into a deity. It is also about the process of undressing, unmasking. As part of Spirits in Steel, Douglas Camp explored the idea of the undressing of a masker by irate spectators, the worst form of humiliation that a masquerader can endure. When works for this exhibition were being made, "Nigerians in the Delta were killed without trial, and everyone felt lost with this sort of injustice - I wanted to show the gods had left us and we were just left with men pretending to be gods." (in Barnwell, 1999)