The wide river of you moves through us as I touch you back into egg-shaped catamarans and point your face south to Africa. By the kinks and curls of your buried follicles I drag you up from the frozen red clay.
—Nikky Finney
Adebunmi Gbadebo works with resonant materials to bring forward the lives of people who were enslaved in the American South. The red soil she uses to make clay is dug from burial plots at the True Blue plantation in South Carolina, the place where her ancestors were forced to labour. She mixes the clay by hand, reminiscent of the methods used by the Old Edgefield potters of South Carolina – a group of African American ceramicists who developed their craft despite the hurdles imposed by their enslavement – and uses a coil method rooted in Nigerian and Cameroonian traditions. She embeds rice in some of her vessels, and human hair and afro locs in others, to create what she describes as funerary objects meant to commemorate her family and restore the land. Screenprints and works on paper incorporating handmade inks and pigments sourced according to similar methods surround these precious objects, evoking the watery landscape around the plantation.
