Wood, 44 cm. These Idimu masks, like all the large wooden masks from the Warega region, are extremely rare and used for all the important ceremonies. This mask is an excellent example, grand and expressive. It is layered with many coats of white Kaolin, a clay that is a sacred substance associated with the land of the ancestors, collected along the riverbanks. It contains relatively large quartz or mica fragments. The crystalline reflection augmented the clay's important role in spiritual matter, the communication with the ancestors as well as a heightened visibility. (VJ)

Provenance:
Carlo Monzino collection, Milan. Biebuyck "Lega Culture; Art, Initiation and Moral Philosophy among a Central African People", University of California Press, 1973, page 54. 'Trusteeship by Kindi'.

Larger masks are fundamentally different in function, meaning and manner of ownership from the maskettes. The wooden idumu, for example, are large, have beards and are mostly almost completely whitened, at least when they occur in the rites... In some cases, they are hung on a specially erected fence and surrounded by the individually owned maskettes, in which case the idimu represent what we would consider to be the arch-patriarch or the primordial founder of the group, or the originator of the particular mask rite in that group. In some initiation rites, the mask may be worn by preceptor high on the forehead, the beard hanging before the face, or on the side of the head."