Adebunmi Gbadebo

Born 1992 in Lenni-Lenape/Livingston, United States of America
Lives and works in Lenni-Lenape/Livingston, United States of America

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.

Adebunmi Gbadebo is a multimedia artist who uses culturally and historically imbued materials to investigate the complexities between land, matter, and memory. Centring on deeply resonant materials like indigo dye, soil hand dug from plantations, and human Black hair collected throughout the diaspora, Gbadebo has formed a visual vocabulary entirely her own. The resulting works tend to carry the stories of ancestors, families, and individuals either long overlooked or too closely surveilled. Guided by evidence that body and land can be a repository for memory, Gbadebo’s work asks us to consider how we tell history through memory and matter. 

Read more about the 24th Biennale of Sydney, Ten Thousand Suns, by purchasing the catalogue here.