For Mama Adama at the Penumbra Project Space
On View — by appointment only: July 1 — Aug 9, Hours: 2 — 6pm
Opening Reception — Thursday, July 1, 6 — 8pm
Penumbra Foundation is pleased to present For Mama Adama, a solo exhibition by Brooklyn-based artist Adama Delphine Fawundu.
The exhibition displays nearly fifty works made by Fawundu in the last several years, some of which she developed as a 2020 Penumbra Workspace artist-in-residence.
In these works, Fawundu appropriates motifs found on her grandmother's fabrics and transforms them into patterns of exploration. Experimenting with color, form, scale and surface and using textiles, papers and different photo-graphic processes, Fawundu examines the relationship between materiality and identity.
In reflection on the personal nature of her subject matter and process, Fawundu writes, “For Mama Adama is a spiritual conversation between myself and my grandma Adama who passed away in 1997. At times, I am her, as she continues to see through my eyes, the daughter of her first son. This series was inspired by my grandmother’s Garra textile business in Pujehun, Sierra Leone. Garra is a form of tie-dying and batiking. I have a collection of her textiles, some of which she created over 50 years ago and now form the basis for generating the negatives and positives used in my production of silver gelatin, photo lumen, cyanotype, screen and linoleum prints.
Drawing on the layered nature of Garra fabrics, I combine these processes to create new patterns and new languages while activating body memory and my ancestral consciousness. This work is an exploration of the complex nature of identity and reproduction. Building on previous knowledge, we are free to conceive new ideas, new spaces and new ways of being by awakening the radical imagination and dynamically expressing who we were, who we are and who we want to be.”
