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 take

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