Wooden Dreams

1. No publication of this kind on the market. 2. Today all museums in the world exhibiting tribal, ethnographic, or African art have specialised headrest areas, sections, or departments. This includes major museums such as the British Museum (Carved Wooden Headrests): The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Headrests); The World Museum Liverpool (Africa Collection). 3. Headrests are extremely popular with antique dealers and collectors, and there is an important market associated with this type of art. 4. In the last decade or so, the demand of ethnographic, utilitarian art has become almost as important as anthropomorphic and zoomorphic art, and headrests have become appreciated collection items. Wooden Dreams will be a reference book for African art and more particularly in the specific domain of utilitarian art and artefacts. Target audience would be art merchants, private collectors, galleries, and museums. Considering its research and visual content (short anthropological narratives), universities, research and ethnographic centres, and libraries would also be direct customers. 5. An easy, accessible, and very visual design of the book with historic pictures will also appeal to a vast audience, who would like to have it as a coffee-table book. People interested in art, culture, ethnicity, anthropology, aesthetics, creativity, tradition, and spirituality would certainly be attracted to this book. especially knowing that headrests are becoming "extinct."

Headrests are simple, utilitarian objects. Widely used across Africa, they are predominantly found in the eastern, central, and southern part of the continent. The volume features full-colour pictures of very rare and fine headrests that have never before been published.Headrests are simple, utilitarian objects. Widely used across Africa, they are predominantly found in the eastern, central, and southern part of the continent. Also known as neckrests or pillows, headrests are valuable and very personal objects which are indispensable to everyday life. They are made to sleep on, to rest the neck, to sit on, and to protect the elaborate coiffure of their owners. At first sight, they appear to be devoid of any symbolic content. This functional utility has confined them through history to the realm of mere objects. Headrests are not that simple, though. They transcend their material purpose to become something more. In many instances, their design, inherent beauty, technical mastery, and uses give them a multi-purpose value and a multi-layered meaning. They are objects with ritual and magical intent concealed inside their utilitarian function. Headrests can be flaunted as status symbols that differentiate chiefs from ordinary people, rich from poor, diviners from healers, farmers from shepherds, and sedentary from nomadic. The volume features full-colour pictures of very rare and fine headrests that have never before been published. Short texts introduce selected pieces among the 230 works that have particularly interesting, well-documented backgrounds. This book is a journey through ethnicity, anthropology, aesthetics, creativity, tradition, and spirituality. A journey to a part of Africa that materialises through a simple artefact that sometimes dreams to become art: a dream that starts with resting the neck on a piece of wood.