Ladi Kwali was a well-known potter from the Gwari region of Nigeria, where pottery was a traditional female industry. She fashioned big pots from clay coils pounded from the inside with a wooden paddle for use as water jars, cooking pots, bowls, and flasks. Scorpions, lizards, crocodiles, chameleons, snakes, birds, and fish were among the carved geometric and stylized figurative patterns. The neolithic period is shown in the pottery pots and decorative styles.

Throughout her career, she created pottery influenced by the Gbagyi heritage and embellished with personal idioms. Mathematical undertones paralleled her approach to clay, which were obvious in the constant exhibition of symmetry.

The classic Ladi Kwali pot was made of stoneware clay and adorned with lizard motifs before being burned with a dark lustrous finish. Michael Cardew, who was assigned to the colonial Nigerian Government’s position of Pottery Officer in 1951, founded the Pottery Training Centre in Suleja (then known as “Abuja”) in 1952.

Ladi Kwali became the Abuja Pottery’s first female potter in 1954. She decorated bowls using sgraffito, which entailed dipping vessels in red or white slip and then scratching the decoration into the underlying body with a porcupine quill.

 

Ladi Kwali Age: When was Ladi Kwali Born?

She was born in Kwali, now the Kwali Area Council of the Federal Capital Territory (FCU), in 1925, however, some sources claim she was born in 1920. As a result, her true age remains unknown, and died in Minna, Nigeria, on August 12, 1984..