June was a notably rainy month in Miami, and Adama Delphine Fawundu made practical use of such precipitation: Each day, the artist would set out large buckets to collect the rainwater, which she would then mix with cotton pulp. She’d then embed this papier mache with objects collected both during her Fountainhead residency and throughout her many travels - cowrie shells, feathers, twigs, grains of rice - and these paper pieces were mounted onto the wall, interspersed with indigo cloths and later dyed and painted over. The ensuing work, when i paint myself #1 (2023) was a new direction for Fawundu, who is formally trained as a photographer and tends to work mostly in film, photography and installation. But the perfect confluence of factors allowed Fawundu to expand her breadth significantly in Miami - not just the time and space afforded by a month away from home, but the recent discovery that part of her ancestral roots traced back to Cuba saw Fawundu experimenting with new materials and references. 

“Materiality has become a bigger part of my work,” says Fawundu, “and I’ve begun to source materials from all over the Caribbean, thinking about the conection between all of these locations and references.”

Fawundu’s research-driven process connects to the larger symbolic history of the African diaspora. She’s most concerned with the ashe - the Yoruba philosophy defined as the power to make things happen - and how its developed out of systems that were put in place to annihilate African cultures. She utilizes photography as a metaphor for the ashe, embedding all of her works with negative prints that she screen or block prints before overlaying with found materials. 

The buzzing, performative energy found in her work directly references the powerful ashe, and Fawundu is leaning further into it after her time in Miami. “I’m rethinking how I’m approaching my art by changing my own consciousness and reflecting on how its always changing,” she says.