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# Sustainability as Practice, November 2026
- URL: https://the-clay-commons.ghost.io/november-2026/
- Published: 2026-09-25T16:29:08.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-27T21:30:02.000Z
- Author: Eva Masterman

Podcast episode and Member Seminar with Adebunmi Gbadebo (USA)

*Members have a chance to meet the Podcast Guest, ask questions, deep dive into their practice and discuss ideas with leading ceramic professionals.*

Adebunmi Gbadebo *(Ah-dae-bu-mee Bha-dae-bo)* is a multidisciplinary artist working with paper, ceramics, sound, and film, exploring the archival record of her family’s ancestry in Nigeria and enslavement in America. Through her research, material selection, and technical process, the artist emphasizes the prejudice of the historical record, activating her practice to restore Black subjectivity. 

Delving into her lineage, she discovered that her maternal family was enslaved at the True Blue plantation in Fort Motte, South Carolina. This site has become a focal point in Gbadebo’s practice, a place where she has reconnected with relatives, visited and cleaned her family’s graves, explored the fields where her ancestors grew indigo and rice, collected field recordings of the surrounding wilderness, and gathered soil, cotton, water, rice, bones, and archival data to incorporate into her art.

When creating ceramics, she makes her own clay by excavating dirt from burial sites at True Blue, reinforcing the earth with ball, bentonite, or red-art clay, and irrigated water from the plantation’s grounds. She employs various processes for mixing the clay, at times working the material by hand—conjuring the style of the Old Edgefield potters of South Carolina—or utilizing a clay mixer, echoing how industrialization, intended to improve working conditions, in fact made slave labor far more strenuous and dangerous. Each pot is hand built using a Nigerian or Cameroonian coil method, then fired using either a gas or pit apparatus, drawing out the rusted and scorched tones of the earth at True Blue—an oxidized red patina reminiscent of West-African soil.

[https://adebunmi.carbonmade.com/about](https://adebunmi.carbonmade.com/about?ref=the-clay-commons.ghost.io)

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