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.
