Onwọ

Onwọ directly translates to ‘beeswax’ in English and can be used to describe the wax model made by brass-casters. It is an essential material, because when heated the Onwọ melts and creates a vacuum for the molten bronze or brass. Onwọ can refer to bees and honey as well. In contemporary Benin City the brass-casters sometimes substitute Onwọ with candle wax. However, Onwọ cannot be totally replaced in this process, and the brass-casters confirm that some works could only be designed using Onwọ.

During the first half of the twentieth century, a small number of Onwọ was acquired by European anthropologists and ethnographers in Benin City as part of larger ‘sets’ of casting materials that showed the technological process of lost-wax casting. These models have a clay core and wax model applied to the top, and they show how brass-casters sculpted objects, often highly detailed ones, with wax. Owing to the nature of lost-wax casting, where the mould has to be broken to release the object inside, each object had to be formed individually in wax, and therefore no two objects can be exactly the same.