It takes 13 hours for Adebunmi Gbadebo to drive from her home in Germantown to the former plantation in South Carolina where her ancestors are buried. Yet she makes the trip several times a year, back to what used to be True Blue plantation’s slave cemetery in Fort Motte.

She goes for the dirt.

Adebunmi digs up the red clay soil by hand, methodically filling vats until she has around 800 pounds of it. Then she drives it all back to Philadelphia, where the real work starts.

First, she sifts through the dirt by hand, pulling out all the rocks, pine needles, leaves, twigs. Then she mixes it into a clay she can actually use, kneading it into the correct consistency for a kiln. Finally, after hours spent on preparing the material itself, she starts building her vessels, winding coil after coil into the shapes she has become known for. They must then sit and dry before being fired twice, first at around 1,800 degrees, then at around 1,000.

“My work is very laborious,” Adebunmi says. “It’s strenuous. It’s a lot on my body.”

It’s also deliberate. Adebunmi could just buy her clay, like pretty much everyone else. She doesn’t. Because she’s not just collecting soil. She’s excavating tangible evidence of the people who came before her, and making it into art.

Digging up the past

The clay Adebunmi hauls from Fort Motte becomes a body of work that first drew wide attention in 2022, when it was included in “Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. That show that placed her alongside contemporary ceramicists and the work of David Drake, an artist who made pottery while enslaved in the same region a century and a half earlier. This year, she’s one of the artists representing the United States at the Venice Biennale.

Born in 1992 in Livingston, New Jersey, and raised in nearby Maplewood, she’s the daughter of a Black American mother and a Nigerian father. She earned a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York and later a certification in Creative Place Keeping from the New Jersey Institute of Technology. In 2022, she received a Pew Fellowship. The following year brought the Maxwell and Hanrahan Craft Fellowship, and a keynote speaking slot at the American Ceramic Circle’s annual conference.

From a distance, her vessels read as classical forms, wide-mouthed and rounded at the base, echoing the shape of the body. But if you look more closely, you see the drama in the surface. Fired dark and uneven, their texture is marked by streaks of black ash where hair and sawdust burned against the hot clay. Some hold grains of rice, pressed into the clay one at a time until they stand up from the surface like small blades.

The rice isn’t incidental. True Blue, the plantation where Adebunmi’s ancestors were enslaved, grew rice and indigo. The crops that built the plantation’s wealth are the same materials she now presses into clay dug from its ground.

In an October 2025 New Yorker article, staff writer Doreen St. Félix described the effect of seeing the vessels in person as something felt on the skin before it registered in the mind, calling the overall impression one in which “history is alive.”

Made for the gallery

Adebunmi grew up surrounded by professionals. “My dad was a civil engineer. My mom was a lawyer. My aunt is an engineer. My uncle’s an engineer. My cousin went to medical school,” she says.

It was her mother who recognized something different in her daughter, and made room for it.

“She had artistic abilities, and when she recognized that in me, she created an environment where that creativity could be valuable,” Adebunmi says.

That meant private art classes starting young, and museum trips before she could really remember them. It also meant her mother pushed further than most parents would.

“She took me to our community center, where I was one of the youngest children in life drawing classes with a bunch of adults drawing naked people. I was that kid,” Adebunmi says.

From the beginning, her family treated her work with respect.

“The things that I created, it wasn’t just on the fridge. She literally turned our home into a gallery. Family would come over. I would be critiqued by family members and vice versa. I was having shows, like exhibiting my drawing of Simba from Lion King in our local gallery,” Adebunmi says. “To be in a family like that, almost all Ivy League educated people, art gave me a lane to be recognized and appreciated.”

Memories in the land

Adebunmi’s process isn’t just about the dirt. It’s about the hands, and a kind of physical memory of work that she says lives inside her body.

“The processes that I’m implementing, whether it be working in indigo, whether it be coil building, I’m using a Nigerian coil technique,” Adebunmi says. “These processes have been passed down from ancestor to ancestor to ancestor. And these processes connect us back to the continent, to West Africa.”

That connection isn’t symbolic. It’s historical, and specific.

“Slave traders specifically stole people, kidnapped people who had certain processes, techniques, on how to grow various crops, how to grow indigo, how to grow rice,” Adebunmi says. “My family was enslaved on a rice and indigo plantation. They stole those Africans that had that knowledge and brought them to South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia. And those processes, those skills that we held, that we have within us, were implemented forcibly on these plantations to grow literally the new world, the Western world, as we know it.”

For Adebunmi, her work is a direct line to the people who came before her, and she feels that link in her body. In the moments when her body is most worn down, digging soil in the July heat or kneading clay for hours, she finds herself thinking about the ancestors who didn’t get to choose their own labor.

“There’s a way in which I continue these skills, the memory, the culture, through my own body, through my process,” Adebunmi says. “I’m in no way saying that the labor I’m implementing in my work is comparable to the labor my enslaved ancestors had to go through. It doesn’t compare in any way. But I do believe it keeps a level of empathy within my process. In those moments where I feel extremely exhausted, it’s me leaning on the thought of, how did they feel?”

Naming the labor

Two of Adebunmi’s pieces hold thousands of grains of rice, each one placed by hand.

“I think the way people see that is, they notice each grain of rice was placed there, one by one,” Adebunmi says. “Their appreciation of that labor creates an appreciation for the labor that created this history.”

She wants that labor visible everywhere in her work, down to the language used to describe it.

“The wall labels may say, ‘soil hand dug from True Blue’,” she says. “I want the labor to be present and acknowledged. I think that creates value for the labor that created this history.”

Still, Adebunmi says, she doesn’t ever let herself forget the difference between her labor and theirs.

“I have a choice to work with this soil and what comes from it,” she says. “They didn’t have a choice in what came from that red clay.”