Anne Adams

MFA 2024, Ceramics

Anne Adams is a multidisciplinary artist. She is from Southern Kaduna State of Nigeria. Adams references the rich cultural heritage of the Nok people, an ancient civilization discovered in 1928 in parts of Kaduna, where some of the earliest form of terracotta sculptures found in Sub Saharan Africa (made around 1500 BC), were excavated from the artist hometown in Zonkwa. As a descendant with direct kinship to this historically significant region, her work becomes a poignant reflection on the intersections of personal/cultural identity and the lost narrative of an era, simultaneously confronting the shadows cast by the legacy of colonialism and imperialism, and acknowledging its resulting complexities and disruptions through research, technical processes, material and reimagination.  

Her sculptures are anthropomorphic, capturing the intersections of time and space in a postmodern world. Adams’s practice investigates and explores hybridity, reflecting on the nuances of identity and identity formation within a postcolonial, posthuman and postfeminist framework. In her work, she sees the potential for everything to be and exist in multiples, embracing plurality and rejecting monolithic/homogenous narratives of truth, reason and identity. In this way, she creates work that embodies transcending and evolving in-between dimensions of the past, present and future, human/nonhuman, abstract and figural, self and the other. The installation of her work is very crucial in the way she envisions critical dialogue with Art made by Africans, it challenges the ambiguous categorization and western methodologies of engaging with art from the continent. In her installation, sculptures are seen standing gallantly above water surrounded by natural elements or bordered by a myriad of lines that intuitively respond to the liminal space.  

She is interested in the histories of people, cultural practices, cultural redefinition, and hybridization as a means of sustainability in the evolution and trajectory of societies. Drawing inspiration from the legacy of precolonial Nigerian art, her work is a celebration of the profound mastery and intellectual ingenuity of her predecessors, whose use and intentionality are still enigmatic and open to interpretation, which itself is a mirror for the artist to story tell and imagine possible futures.