Kobina Adusah wanted to make animation. Logos, flyers, branding — images that move fast and pay quickly. Then the admission letter arrived from the university in Kumasi and told him he had been placed in ceramics. “I was very interested in animation, branding, and making flyers,” he says, “but when my admission letter arrived, I had been placed in ceramics.” He stayed four years, and then a fifth as a teaching assistant, and has since discovered what the accident was for: speed was never what he needed.
His terracotta vessels are built the slowest way available — slab by slab, form upon form, nothing thrown, nothing rushed. “I often describe it as building a house, brick by brick,” he says. “That method requires patience, and I like that discipline.” The scale is deliberate for the same reason: a big piece buys him time in its company. This is the opposite of the career he thought he wanted, and it produced work that put him on the LOEWE Craft Prize shortlist and, this spring, into his first London solo — Inherited Beings, at Gallery FUMI.
His mother's stitch
The surfaces are what stop people. Dense fields of carved lines, grooves and incisions cover the vessels like a script — cut into the clay while it is still soft, made permanent by the fire. The gesture came from home: “When I was younger, my mother used to ask me to sew buttons onto shirts,” he says. “I could translate that same repetitive gesture into the surface.” A seamstress's chore, remembered by the hand and enlarged into an idiom. “The surface is my signature.”
It is the same intelligence at work in Xanthe Somers's woven vessels and in the Frafra Tapestry's borrowed basketry: a domestic technique, usually filed under women's work and left off the wall label, promoted to the status of language.
An alphabet still in draft
Here is the part that makes him unusual. Asked what the marks mean, Adusah does not supply the tidy symbolism a market rewards. “Many of the marks don't have fixed meanings yet,” he says. “They come from feeling and more of a research cypher.” Not a code to be decrypted by the wall text, then, but an alphabet in progress, gathering meaning slowly, the way a language does — from use.
He also refuses the one ritual every designer is taught. “No, I don't sketch. Everything starts in my head. Sketching fixes ideas too early for me.” For a man trained in a country where design education runs on the drawn plan, this is a small heresy, and it explains why the work looks argued rather than illustrated. He lets the clay carry a vote too, accepting the cracking and shifting and resistance instead of correcting them — listening to the material rather than commanding it.
The ground that remembers
“The earth we walk holds memory, mystery, and story,” he says. “Clay, to me, is not inert.” That sentence could be an artist-statement platitude, but his practice earns it: he sources and carves and fires the raw material himself, and treats his forms as inheritors — ancestry and migration and fragility arriving as atmosphere rather than illustration.
West African craft is having a decade in which it no longer waits to be translated. Ghana's photographers rewrote their own image at Arles this summer; the weavers of Bolgatanga put their own names on a tapestry that made the LOEWE citation. Adusah's contribution is the most patient of the three: a script that has not decided what it says. Give it a few more years of buttons sewn into clay, and it may tell us.