The Headrests offer yet another angle in Mann’s ongoing investigation of embodiment and perception. Inspired by artifacts from ancient Egypt and other (particularly Eastern and Southern) African cultures—used to support the head during sleep or funeral—these sculptures are shaped by a deep contact with the artist’s own life. In some, the imprint of her forehead or nose is subtly embedded in the clay. Each piece becomes both a portrait and a counter- form, simultaneously abstract and intimate, deeply bodily. For Mann, the headrest serves as a spiritual threshold; a point of contact between body and earth, self and world. The installation is an invitation into her own world, her own spirituality as in the soul’s connection to the ungraspable, to ephemerality. The headrests, here, work as a cryptic alphabet—crafted from the artist’s processing of loss and grief, and interwoven with the attempted reconstruction and questioning of familial ties — which guides the viewer in reading the piece as a testimony to care and vulnerability.

Across all three bodies of work, Mann returns to the ground—physically and metaphorically. “The ground is sculpture,” she asserts. It is the site of encounter, of weight, of support. From here, her sculptures rise cautiously, even hesitantly, into being. They carry with them emotional states—fear, shame, the urge to stand upright—and ask what it means to give ephemeral, invisible experiences a physical form. The result is the construction of a language, a sculptural syntax that speaks in imprints, silences, and shadows.