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Yaw Baafi

Yaw Baafi is mentioned in Keepers of the Arts, a beautiful hardcover book available through Novica. He has also been featured in The Star-Ledger newspaper.

Yaw Baafi was born into a community of carvers on the first of June, 1975. After successfully completing his primary education and a liberal arts program at the secondary level, Baafi went off to train as a draftsman at the Catholic Training Institute. He passed as a certified Draughtsman in 1998. After some dissatisfaction with the low economic returns of his professional practice, Baafi ventured into the field of sculpting, something he had known since he was very little.

Wood sculpting was and is second nature to Baafi's childhood home. Like other youths there, he played around with pieces of wood, cutting, trimming and sanding them until he'd realized an object of his imagination. But with time the playfulness naturally transformed Baafi into an adept wood sculptor. His stool carving, human forms, masks covered with intricate features and other complicated objects came quite easily. In other words, the years of meddling with bits of wood during school holidays came to great fruition. Indeed his works all bear the marks of excellence.

In Baafi's workshop, he and his craftsmen use the best woods, cedar and sese in particular, for all productions. They rely on Mother Nature's shaded warmth to gently dehumidify the blocks of wood that they use. Normally this drying process follows when a sketchy carving has been made out of a block of wood. The process assures the elimination of cracks and other unwanted defects on the finished product.

Baafi carves both traditional and popular objects as well as objects of his own inspired creativity. He explains that he carves different masks for family, unity and ancestors that have social, ethnic and historic significance.

He says, "Some of my sculptures are reminiscent of times in Ashanti history when our warriors donned fearful masks and other military accoutrements to instill the most dreadful sense of awe and terror in the hearts of their enemy warriors. But family masks can be seen as pointers to important families and clans and their unique identities. It is significant to note that animal objects incorporated with mask features also denote clan, ethnic or family identities."

Baafi noticed his next door neighbor was a brass sculptor and gradually became interested in this profession, spending a greater portion of his time assisting him. One day, his neighbor's teacher arrived on a visit to his former apprentice, "I used that occasion by secretly giving money to the visitor in exchange for some trade secrets on brass sculpting. And this paid very well. Before the visitor left, I became well vested in the art of brass sculpting but relegated this aspect of the job to the background to avoid any conflict with my next door neighbor. In the course of time, my neighbor closed his workshop and left to seek greener pastures in Nigeria. I seized this opportunity and established a small brass workshop unit next to my wood carving workshop and started turning out very intricate pieces of brass products alongside my wood carving products."

Yaw Baafi has a little girl with his wife.