Etiyé Dimma Poulsen (b. 1968) is an Ethiopian-born Danish sculptor and painter working in Belgium. Her sculptures are held by the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, the Hood Museum of Art and the Musée national de céramique in Sèvres. Self-taught, she developed her own technique of coating a wire armature with a thin layer of clay that cracks in firing, giving her slender, elongated female figures a weathered, archaic surface.
Etiyé Dimma Poulsen (b. 1968, Ethiopia) is an Ethiopian-born Danish sculptor and painter who lives and works in Belgium. Adopted by a Danish family, she spent her childhood in Tanzania and Kenya before moving to Denmark at the age of fourteen, where she studied art history. She began as a painter in oil on canvas, but her interest in sculpture took her to France in 1991, where she set up her first workshop and started working with clay; in 2003 she moved to Belgium. Without formal art training, she developed a distinctive technique of applying a thin layer of clay over an iron wire armature, which cracks in the firing to give her figures a weathered, archaic surface. Her slender, elongated figures – most often women – explore beauty, dignity and vulnerability through minimal detail and textured surfaces. Although they echo traditional African and Oceanic art, she resists labelling her work as African, describing it instead as belonging to “several families”. Since the early 1990s she has exhibited widely in Europe, Africa, North America and Japan, and in 2003 her work was included in “Ethiopian Passages: Dialogues in the Diaspora” at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art. Her sculptures are held by the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington, the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, the Hood Museum of Art, the Newark Museum and the Musée national de céramique in Sèvres. The bronze and metal sculpture “Sun Goddess”, 227 cm high and cast in an edition of eight, is offered by TUMO Gallery as number 4/8.
