Adebunmi Gbadebo and the Mysteries of Clay

The relationship between Adebunmi Gbadebo and her material, clay, is one of supplication—on the part of Gbadebo. The churched among us consider a potter something of an autocrat; they find masochistic affinity with the idea of clay as the humble, dumb stuff of life of which they are made. But clay will give its protest. In certain environmental situations, clay will choose catastrophe. Gbadebo wants badly to keep clay in an almost illusory state, the state of half animation, a petrified willfulness, so that it can tell us, shaped on the plinth, what it is that it thinks.

Gbadebo makes, at certain intervals, a pilgrimage. She drives from her studio in Philadelphia to True Blue Cemetery, a burial ground for the enslaved and their descendants, in Fort Motte, South Carolina. The cemetery takes its name from the adjoining plantation, True Blue, operated for centuries by families including the Ravenells; the plantation, in turn, was named for its prize product: indigo. The level of the iron in the bedrock in this part of the country is too low to produce ore for steel, but it is enough to tinge the soil rust-red. Gbadebo hand-digs the soil, filling vats and vats, a total of about eight hundred pounds, which she takes back to her studio, where she sifts out detritus, adds water and secondary clays, then churns it into viable clay. She then shapes the clay into vessels of varying ovoid containers, squat forms around eighteen inches in diameter that might look like baskets, the pelvis, and/or planted seeds at the cataclysmic moment of rupture. Gbadebo fires her vessels twice, some undergoing a variation of the Japanese raku technique in which the first fire typically gets to around eighteen-hundred degrees and the second gets to around a thousand degrees. At this stage, the vessels are extracted. They endure the stress of an extraordinary drop in temperature, followed by the addition of hot sawdust, hair, and sugar—which Gbadebo explained to me, the other day, as a “final burial.” The ambit of death. The carbon in the combustible breathes itself into the surface of the ceramics, leaving sweeps of black, inflections that Gbadebo can control only up to a point. The vessels, having left their cryptic communication, get named for the people buried at True Blue. “Ellis Sanders,” “John Ricen Ravenell,” “Maum Hannah”: these names belong to Gbadebo’s ancestors. She learned of them in researching the will of a Ravenell slave owner. Recently, she described herself to me as a grieving person.

I did not know of Gbadebo’s family history when I visited her début solo show, “Watch Out for the Ghosts” (a reference to Amiri Baraka’s epic poem “Why’s/Wise”), at the Nicola Vassell Gallery, earlier in September. But I had felt an unease in the atmosphere that lasted long after and eventually crystallized into something hard and real. The aftereffect of the show was of feeling . . . pricked. Sensations inched up the arm. Touch is the subordinated sense in the gallery, activated, at this show, because of Gbadebo’s surfaces. But the phantom feeling takes a minute to register. From a distance, the analysis stems from the eye, which is delighted by the wide mouths, the undulations at the base that piously suggest the tradition of honoring the female form. The vessels, sitting on teal plinths, are beckoning, timeless objects. But, as you draw near, the concentration of energy shifts from shape to “skin” and negative space. This is an entirely different drama. Gbadebo fills, for example, one container that evokes a fertility devotional sculpture with mounds of rice. The pleasant wide mouth now looks, upon closer inspection, like a bottomless hole, the rice, like larvae, reproducing endlessly. Elsewhere, Gbadebo individuates the grains, embedding them in the vessels’ outer skin, so they stand erect and extrusive. In another piece, they jut out like teeth. Other organic materials are recruited in her mixed-media art, her play at a taboo of what constitutes “material”; human hair, horsehair, pine needles, seeds, animal bone, cherry-tree branch. So in a sense, in this room, funerary vessels are alive—history is alive.

Gbadebo is thirty-three. She was born to a Black American mother and a Nigerian father, and raised in Maplewood, New Jersey. At art school, she didn’t care much for Eurocentric studies of painting, which she felt were forced on her. She needs space, gravity, and dimensionality. And life force. There is a sense that Gbadebo, who is also a Yoruba priest, feels drained amid the non-vital. Her early materials included hair, which she collected at barbershops or from far-flung donors. (Her website includes an address for hair donations.) After discovering the resting ground of her matrilineal line, following her mother’s death, Gbadebo expanded her materials to include the fruit of slavery’s industry—rice, cotton, and indigo. Her other medium is paper, interventions to the concrete ledgers of capital-H history, made from clay, plantation soil, and cotton pulp, and dyes using liquefied soil and indigo. All of her work bears the mark of its creation. It always seems as if the artist has just left.

When I spoke to Gbadebo, it occurred to me that I was calling her a sculptor or a ceramicist interchangeably. Which one was right? Rightness was the issue. “I guess I identify more with the idea that I’m a sculptor, although I embrace all titles, but this is sculptural work,” she told me.