A pair of Fon Fertility iron sculptures, southern Togo. Signs of oxidation and ritual use. Fon iron fertility sculptures originate from the Fon-speaking peoples of southern Benin, historically associated with the Kingdom of Dahomey. These objects are forged rather than cast and are embedded in ritual practices concerned with human fertility, agricultural abundance, and the regulation of vital force. They function as activated instruments within religious systems rather than as autonomous visual representations, and their meaning derives primarily from ritual efficacy, secrecy, and controlled handling. The sculptures are typically made of wrought iron and produced by specialist blacksmiths whose craft is itself imbued with spiritual potency. In Fon cosmology, ironworking mediates between elemental forces, particularly fire, earth, and transformative power. As a result, the material is not neutral; iron embodies agbara, a concentrated vital energy that can stimulate growth, reproduction, and protection while also posing danger if improperly controlled. Fertility sculptures are often small-scale, schematic, and portable, enabling their use in shrines, domestic spaces, or agricultural contexts. Iconographically, Fon iron fertility sculptures frequently emphasize sexual characteristics, pregnancy, or paired male and female principles. Forms may be highly abstracted, consisting of linear silhouettes, loops, spirals, or minimally articulated human bodies. Anatomical exaggeration is not intended as naturalism but as a visual condensation of reproductive force. In some examples, the human figure is reduced to a sign-like configuration, suggesting that legibility to initiated viewers is more important than mimetic clarity. These objects are closely associated with vodun practices, particularly cults related to earth, lineage continuity, and female reproductive power. They may be employed in rites seeking conception, safe childbirth, or the healing of infertility. Their efficacy is activated through offerings, incantations, and physical manipulation, including rubbing, anointing, or burial within cultivated land. Surface corrosion, accretions, and structural distortion are therefore essential indicators of prolonged ritual use rather than deterioration. Fon iron fertility sculptures must also be understood within the broader political and economic structure of Dahomey, where iron production was closely regulated and symbolically linked to royal authority and warfare. The same material used to produce weapons was redirected, in ritual contexts, toward sustaining life and lineage. This tension between destructive and generative capacities underscores the ambivalent power of iron within Fon thought. In museum and catalogue settings, these sculptures are often misinterpreted as crude or unfinished due to their reductive forms and material roughness. Such readings overlook the objects’ original epistemological framework, in which abstraction enhances potency and concealment safeguards effectiveness. Removed from their ritual environments, the sculptures persist as traces of a technological and spiritual system in which fertility is not a biological given but a condition requiring continual negotiation with unseen forces. References Blier, Suzanne Preston. African Vodun: Art, Psychology, and Power. University of Chicago Press, 1995. Herskovits, Melville J. Dahomey: An Ancient West African Kingdom. Northwestern University Press, 1938. Maupoil, Bernard. La Géomancie à l’ancienne Côte des Esclaves. Institut d’Ethnologie, 1943. Piqué, Francesca, and Claudia McCabe, eds. From the Earth: African Ceramic Art. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2012. Thompson, Robert Farris. Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy. Vintage Books, 1983. CAB27005 Height: 18 cm / 18 cm (without stand) Weight: 440 g / 300 g (incl. stand)