Studio Visit: Adebunmi Gbadebo

There’s fresh snow on the ground, and winter is rearing its head in Philadelphia. Meeting Adebunmi Gbadebo in her North Philadelphia studio is a welcome retreat. Featuring classic design elements of the early twentieth century—exposed wood beams, gray brick walls, and gorgeous hardwood floors—the space is warm and rustic, just like its host. Gbadebo is an experimental multidisciplinary artist primarily working in ceramics and paper, though she’s always open to creating in other mediums. 

When we speak, Gbadebo is working on a mishmash of burnt red clay pots already fired in the kiln and a large round of paper embedded with indigo-dyed hair that takes up almost half of her paper studio. Tools and materials are spread across nearly every surface in the room, evidence of the many steps of her process. 

Using hundreds of pounds of dirt she’s collected from True Blue Plantation in Fort Motte, South Carolina—the land of her maternal ancestors’ enslavement—Gbadebo crafts clay to create her classic vessels. Reflecting on the irony of the plantation’s name, she remarks, “True who? What is true of that space?” For works on paper, she mixes hand-picked cotton, donated hair, and other natural elements and binds them together in a new form, simulating the Japanese threading technique known as couching, where a strong thread, invisible to the untrained eye, supports a daintier, more decorative one that adorns an embroidery work. Gbadebo’s hands and her family’s essence are imbued into every piece. 

Pottery and papermaking are labor intensive, what Gbadebo jokingly calls “quite a workout.” In making the clay pots, she recounts a process that involves different West African coil-building techniques. For her, the work is about “all that this earth holds: my ancestors, their blood, this history, the spaces that they lived in.” In her pieces, Gbadebo allows us to pay a visit to her place of anthropological envisioning.

Tell us about your studio. Where is it located? How long have you been in this space?

My current studio is in the Frankford neighborhood in Philadelphia, and this building actually used to be an old walking cane factory, so it’s over 100 years old. Originally I only had a smaller space where I now do the paper, and then last year, the artist who was here for 10 years moved out, so I was able to expand into this larger space as well and occupy the entire second floor of the building.

How did you find it?

I grew up in Maplewood, New Jersey, but as a working artist I was based in Newark and had a studio there. I got a five-year residency at the Clay Studio in 2021, so that’s what relocated me to Philadelphia. Originally, I was doing most of my work there, but my practice consists of a lot of different facets and mediums, and I just needed a larger space, so through [ceramicist] Roberto Lugo, I was recommended to look at this space.

Do you feel that working in this place has changed your practice in any significant way?

Having a larger space has really given me the ability to just think larger and expand my practice. Right now I’m working on a nine-foot piece of an abstracted pine tree. The amount of work I can make and not worry about where I am going to store them is so helpful. 

Do you have a uniform while working?

In 2022, I was initiated as a Yoruba priest in Cuba, and for one year and one week after your initiation, you have to wear white from head to toe. So, from 2022 to 2023, I had a uniform where I was wearing all white. Even my apron, which is here somewhere, is stained red. It was just really ironic and funny because I work with indigo, with blue dye, and with red clay that stains everything red. So, for those who didn’t know what I was doing personally and spiritually, it was kind of confusing why I came in every day to work wearing head-to-toe white. But outside of that year, I wear workout clothes or things that I don’t care about necessarily destroying, because it is a very messy practice.

Where in your studio do you most enjoy working?

I do a lot of work at these two tables. This table is actually my dad’s kitchen table that he gave to me. My dad was an engineer, and I have memories of seeing him at his table doing sketches and rendering, and mechanical pencils everywhere. It’s special that I’ve inherited it, and now I have my own creative practice that takes place there. 

Can you describe your studio schedule or artistic rhythm? 

I work with an assistant, Anne Adams, a ceramic and multimedia artist herself, and she comes in three days a week. We’re pretty free in terms of what days we want to come in.

Recently I’ve been working on a print edition with Brandywine [Workshop], so for the last half of 2024, once a week I was going into Brandywine [and] working on that. So, my schedule could be divided between other projects that I’m doing with other spaces and then coming in here.

What’s the first step in your creative process and where do you begin?

For the paper, the work is in preparing: beating and dyeing the cotton the specific colors or the different shades of blue, making the indigo vat, and preparing the frames that I’m going to make the sheet on. The actual making of the sheet is something that has its own kind of velocity, especially because with papermaking you’re working while the pulp is wet. It’s a process where you could almost make a sheet in one day or one instance, but to get there is the real work. And kind of the same for ceramics. Before I even get to building a form, I have to plan a trip to drive down to South Carolina, coordinate with family to go to the plantation and the cemetery. I dig up a couple hundred pounds at a time, drive it back to Philly. It takes hours just to sift out leaves and flowers and pine needles and rocks, adding the other clays to make it plastic enough, mixing it, kneading it. So, for both sides of my practice, a major component is just in the prep.

My exploration [of] the history of the plantation stemmed from my family. My maternal line was preparing for a reunion on True Blue plantation, and that was the first time that I realized in a conscious way that our families not only knew the name of where we were enslaved, but still had a physical relationship and connection to the space. I’m [also] thinking about my family’s land as medicine or the land as refuge. Near the plantation, woodlands existed and were basically deemed as invaluable. . . . [They] became these spaces that we set up [as] maroon communities . . . our escapes . . . the spaces [in] which we buried our loved ones when there was no time to recognize their deaths.

If you had to describe your ideal creative conditions in three words, which words would you choose?

Access to food, lots of light, floors you could fuck up.

What’s one thing that you really enjoy doing outside of the studio? 

I’ve been really getting into screenwriting. It allows me to tap into other ideas and creative things that are festering within me that may not make their way into a vessel or a sheet of paper. I take a screenwriting class online every Monday, and I recently signed up for an in-person screenwriting class at Scribe [Video Center]. I’m technically very new to Philly, so I felt that this would be a good opportunity to be connected to a Black institution with other similar-minded creatives. 

What are you currently working on?

I’m with Nicola Vassell Gallery in Chelsea, New York, and I’m working on my first solo show with them in September. This summer, a short film that I’m working on with Yvonne Shirley that she directed and is a cinematographer on will be premiering at Museum of Fine Arts Boston. And then I have two more shows coming up, one at the Newark Museum in New Jersey and one at the Fitzwilliam Museum in London. And I’ll be in a show with Bode Gallery in South Africa. So, it’s a very big exhibition year.