Heirloom I & II, 2025- ongoing

Cocobolo, oak, bee wax, sheep hair, horse hair, leather

In Heirloom I and Heirloom II, Mpoka reimagines the Bamileke horsehair whisk—an emblem of ritual, status, and performance—through a layered and intimate vocabulary. Composed of hand-carved cocobolo and oak, along with horsehair, sheep wool, and leather, these sculptural forms exist in states of simultaneity: at once domestic and ceremonial, tactile and symbolic, familiar and speculative.

The works reflect the artist’s ongoing interest in objects that live between—between cultures, between functions, between readings. Hair, as material and metaphor, threads through these sculptures as a site of memory, care, and ancestral gesture. Ornament here functions not only as decoration but as a vessel for meaning, embodying histories that resist singular definition and instead draw resonance from multiple contexts.

Heirloom I & II embrace ambiguity as a space of generative potential. Blurring the boundaries between domesticity, mysticism, and identity, they propose a speculative archive—one in which the interior becomes a vessel for cultural memory, transformation, and matrilineal power.

This series was shown at the National Gallery of Canada in 2025 as part of The New Generation Photography Award exhbition, curated by Andrea Kunard.