Artspace

Sam, 2023
soil dug from True Blue Plantation, South Carolina,
human hair, pit fired

Adam, 2023
soil dug from True Blue Plantation, South Carolina,
Carolina Gold rice, pit fired

Sit down Servant
audio, 24 mins looped

Presentation at the 24th Biennale of Sydney was made possible with generous support from Terra Foundation of American Art. Courtesy the artist and Nicola Vassell Gallery.

True Blue Plantation, South Carolina was once an indigo and rice plantation established around 1711. Today there is no discernible acknowledgment of the backbreaking, forcibly enslaved labour that once cultivated this sediment and laid the foundations for what stands there today.

When the artist’s mother Brenda Ravenell passed away of COVID-19 in 2020, Adebunmi Gbadebo made a pilgrimage to the plantation to bury her ashes in the same graveyard where generations of her relatives had been buried since the eighteenth century. From this ground, Gbadebo collected the soil she would shape into a series of vessels in an act she describes as physical and spiritual ‘excavation’. For her the land is, itself, a vessel which holds all that has violently tried to be erased.

The works are presented on a wooden structure replicating the staircase entry of the plantation cemetery designed and built by the artist’s cousin, Benny Haynes, who is taking care of the site in South Carolina; building bridges to give descendants access to these sites, and restoring the plantation graveyards. Each vessel, an extension of the relationship between person and place that was never truly severed within the artist’s family, is crafted with meditative care using indigenous African coil techniques.

Incorporating individually placed grains of rice or human hairs sourced from people of the African diaspora, they confront the violence of slaving history without replicating it. Some grief cannot be buried; it must be carried, in hearts and bloodlines and clay pots.