Guardian Africa networkGhanaAccra exhibition to celebrate work of Paa Joe, the master craftsman behind some of the most extravagant caskets in the world
His work has been bought by US presidents and appears in museum collections all over the world – and yet most of Paa Joe’s creations are buried six feet underground.
Joe, who turned 69 this week, is Ghana’s most prolific coffin artist and, after five decades in the funeral industry producing some of the world’s most extravagant designs, his work is being celebrated in a major exhibition in Accra.
Joe’s work – which includes coffins in the shape of Porsches, naked women, Nike trainers, cameras, Coca-Cola bottles and chilli peppers – is designed to represent the life of the deceased, with each item handcrafted and painted for the funeral procession, which can last up to three days and three nights.
Working with curator Nana Oforiatta-Ayim, Joe and his son Jacob have developed an exhibition that explores the traditions behind the fantasy coffins and their particular popularity within the Ga community in Ghana, where this unique custom began.
“People celebrate death in Ghana. At a funeral, we have a passion for the person leaving us – there are a lot of people, and a lot of noise,” says Jacob, 28, who has worked with his father for eight years.
Far from seeing their work as morbid, Jacob says the coffins are celebratory and reflect west African attitudes to death. “It reminds people that life continues after death, that when someone dies they will go on in the afterlife, so it is important that they go in style.”
Joe’s creations have attracted high-profile fans: Jacob recalls visits from Kofi Annan, the former UN secretary general, and the ex-US president Jimmy Carter, who reportedly purchased two coffins. Bill Clinton also stopped by during an official state visit to Ghana in 1998.
Joe discovered coffin-making when he was 16, when his mother sent him to do an apprenticeship in the Ga fishing community of Teshie. His uncles, Ajetey and Kane Kwei, were prominent fantasy coffin makers in the area in the 1950s, and Joe worked with Kane for 12 years before returning to Accra in 1976 to establish his own workshop.
His first fantasy coffin, carved in 1978, was in the shape of a building and designed for a real-estate developer.
But demand has since slowed, Jacob says. “In Accra, when it was blowing up, we would make up to 10 coffins a month,” he says. Now, the pair – who work alone at their workshop in Pobiman, 15 miles from the capital – create about two a month, though the more complex designs can take longer.
The local price for a coffin for conventional use is equivalent to about £1,500, depending on the commission. Those created for exhibitions can fetch up to £8,000.
But while Joe’s work has received international recognition – displayed at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, the British Museum and the V&A in London, as well as the Brooklyn Museum in New York – he has endured financial hardship at home and was forced to move his workshop out of central Accra to cheaper premises in 2008.
“Any time we travel abroad, people in the western world have a huge respect for our work, but in Ghana they don’t recognise this as art,” Jacob says.
But this is starting to change, and Oforiatta-Ayim says the exhibition, scheduled to be held at ANO, a new art space in Accra, in early 2017, will showcase just how significant a role Joe has played in Ghanaian culture.
“What I love so much about the coffins is that they underline this idea of art being part of life and death in Ghana,” she says. “His coffins have been so prevalent in the birth of contemporary African art in the west.”
Joe is also the subject of a documentary directed by the British film-maker Benjamin Wigley. Paa Joe and the Lion premiered in the UK in August and follows the father and son as they arrive for a one-month residency at Clumber Park botanical gardens in Nottinghamshire, where the pair build a lion-shaped coffin.
After the UK screening, Joe received his biggest commission to date: a request for a Chevrolet Stingray convertible with room for two people.
With the renewed interest in Joe’s work, Jacob is thinking about how his father’s legacy can be protected.
“We are interested in teaching students from abroad, either in Ghana or Europe, and we’re hoping to establish some kind of residency,” he says.
But Joe is not hanging up his tools just yet. He continues to produce caskets at his workshop but says when he does eventually require one himself, he would like his coffin to be in the shape of a hammer.
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