Kobina Adusah’s Inherited Beings: The Vessels He Chooses Already Had a Job to Do

At Gallery FUMI’s Inherited Beings, his first solo exhibition with the gallery, Kobina Adusah’s largest new vessel takes its form from the loutrophoros, the ancient Greek vessel carried in wedding processions and left at the graves of the unmarried dead. It is the latest instance of a pattern running through his short career: Adusah keeps choosing container forms that already carried a specific ritual weight somewhere in history, then filling them with his own family’s.

---

Introduction

Inherited Beings, Kobina Adusah’s debut solo exhibition with Gallery FUMI, ran from 19 February to 14 March 2026 at the gallery’s Mayfair space on Hay Hill, with free entry throughout. It marked Adusah’s first show as a Gallery FUMI artist, arriving in the middle of the busiest stretch of his career so far: FOG Design+Art in San Francisco that January, selected works shown at Collect 2026 at Somerset House during the exhibition’s own run, and a place in a survey of West African design opening in Togo the same season.

Adusah is Ghanaian, based in Kumasi, and works almost entirely in clay, building vessels and sculptural forms through slab construction rather than throwing on a wheel. What makes Inherited Beings more than an introduction to a promising ceramicist is the specific device Adusah keeps returning to: rather than inventing new container shapes, he takes forms that already had a defined ritual function somewhere in history, Greek, Akan or otherwise, and rebuilds them in clay carrying his own family’s material instead.

A gallery built to bet on names nobody has heard yet

Gallery FUMI was founded in 2008 by Sam Pratt and Valerio Capo, neither of whom came from a design background: Pratt and Capo had both worked in corporate roles, marketing and finance respectively, and had been collecting modern design privately before deciding, in the middle of the financial crisis, to open a gallery of their own. Pratt has described the founding logic directly: rather than trade in established, historical design, “we wanted to explore the future, where we could add value,” building relationships with largely unproven makers rather than acquiring already-recognised names.

That founding logic is the reason Inherited Beings fits the gallery’s own pattern rather than reading as an outlier booking. Adusah arrived with a genuine international credential, the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize finalist status, but no prior UK gallery representation, which is precisely the position Gallery FUMI has built its programme around since 2008: working with a maker from close to the beginning of their exhibiting career rather than after the market has already priced them.

A wedding vessel, remade at eighty-two centimetres tall

The exhibition’s largest new work, The Loutrophorus (2026), stands 82.5 centimetres tall with a 28 centimetre diameter, a unique clay piece and the show’s most direct statement of Adusah’s method. The loutrophoros was a real vessel in ancient Greece, used to carry water for a bride’s ritual bath before her wedding, and, in a considerably darker second use, placed on the graves of people who died unmarried, standing in for the wedding rite they never had. A single vessel type, in other words, that ancient Greek households built specifically to mark the beginning or the permanently unrealised beginning of a marriage.

Adusah has cited historical Greek amphorae as a direct influence on his own forms, and The Loutrophorus is where that influence is most legible: a specific, historically documented ritual object, rebuilt at scale in clay and repositioned inside a show about ancestry and inherited memory rather than a Greek household. The choice matters because a loutrophoros was never a neutral container. It was built to do one job, mark a threshold either crossed or permanently missed, which makes it a considered vessel for an artist whose stated subject is what gets carried forward through a family and what does not.

Inherited Beings also included a Crystallization Series (2025), a second, separately dated body of work shown alongside The Loutrophorus, with photography for the series credited to Lukas Wegwerth in Gallery FUMI’s own materials. Between the two, the show set a single, newly made large-scale statement piece against an existing series, giving a visitor arriving without prior knowledge of Adusah’s practice both a career marker and a fresh departure in the same room.

The prize piece that got him noticed

Before Gallery FUMI, Adusah’s clearest calling card was I Still Face You (2023), the work that made him a finalist in the Ceramics category of the 2025 Loewe Foundation Craft Prize, one of thirty finalists selected from entries across at least eighteen countries and exhibited that spring at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid. The prize that year went to the Japanese artist Kunimasa Aoki for Realm of Living Things 19, with special mentions for the Nigerian designer Nifemi Marcus-Bello and Studio Sumakshi Singh of India, which places Adusah’s finalist selection inside a genuinely international field rather than a regional or discipline-specific shortlist. The piece comprises three terracotta forms, titled Without a Paapa, Early Responsibility and Growing with the Cracks, each one built as a real vessel typology rather than a freestanding sculpture: a lidded pot, a sarcophagus and a bicuspid vessel, their surfaces carved directly with patterning drawn from Akan history and mythology alongside Adusah’s own personal symbolism.

The same device runs through I Still Face You that runs through The Loutrophorus two years later: real, historically loaded vessel forms, chosen because they already meant something before Adusah touched them, then carved with a second layer of meaning that is entirely his own. A sarcophagus is not a neutral shape any more than a loutrophoros is, and building one in terracotta and titling it Without a Paapa, Twi for father, is a considerably more specific statement than describing the work as being about ancestry in general.

The choice of terracotta for a work explicitly drawing on Akan history is not incidental either. Akan potters, historically women, have made terracotta memorial portraits known as nsodie since at least the late sixteenth century, sculpting the likeness of a deceased royal or high-status individual, often observed at the deathbed itself, then positioning the finished head in a sacred grove near the cemetery as the focus of ritual offerings and libations to the ancestors. A sarcophagus built in terracotta and carved with Akan symbolism is working inside that existing lineage rather than inventing a relationship between the material and mourning from scratch, a distinction that the published descriptions of the prize entry, which describe the work’s Akan sourcing only in general terms, do not spell out.

How the surface gets there

Adusah does not sketch before building. He has described his method as working “like building a house, brick by brick,” constructing each piece incrementally through slab construction rather than planning a final form in advance and executing towards it. The surfaces that result, the carved, pressed and layered textures visible across his vessels, come from repetitive, meditative gestures that he has traced back to a specific childhood memory of sewing buttons, a domestic, repetitive hand motion that resurfaces in the clay as pattern.

His stated influences sit close to home: the Ghanaian sculptors James Kwame Amoah, KK Broni and Kwame Akoto-Bamfo, encountered during his own childhood, alongside the historical Greek amphorae forms that surface directly in work like The Loutrophorus. Adusah has also spoken about his parents’ divorce as a formative experience behind the emotional register of his work, which he has described as functioning less as invented narrative than as a container for lived experience, a distinction that separates his ancestral subject matter from a more generic craft-world interest in heritage as theme.

From Kumasi to Mayfair in under a year

Adusah did not originally choose ceramics. He studied visual arts at school with some exposure to design, and was placed into the ceramics programme at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, having hoped for communication or graphic design instead. Four years of undergraduate study followed, then a further year working as a teaching assistant, an experience he has credited with deepening his understanding of clay processes well beyond what the undergraduate course alone covered. He is currently completing an MFA in ceramics at the same institution.

The year either side of Inherited Beings has moved fast. I Still Face You’s Loewe Foundation Craft Prize finalist status in 2025 was followed by a place in Design in West Africa: Unity in Multiplicity, a survey exhibition at the Palais de Lomé in Togo running from 21 January to 15 March 2026 and curated by Nicolas Bellavance-Lecompte, where Adusah showed work from a series titled Être Vivant, including a piece called Être tissé, built in earthenware. FOG Design+Art in San Francisco followed the same January, and Inherited Beings opened at Gallery FUMI in February, overlapping directly with Collect 2026 at Somerset House, where Gallery FUMI gave its stand over entirely to a solo presentation of Adusah’s terracotta sculptures. Four cities, three continents’ worth of design calendars, inside little more than a year, is an unusually fast run for an artist whose first solo gallery show had not yet opened.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

Inherited Beings closed at Gallery FUMI on 14 March 2026 having made a specific case rather than a general one about ancestry and clay. Adusah does not build invented vessel shapes and ask them to carry inherited meaning after the fact. He finds container forms that already had a defined job somewhere in history, a Greek wedding vessel, an Akan sarcophagus, and builds them again in clay with his own family’s material folded into the surface. The Loutrophorus stands 82.5 centimetres tall in a Mayfair gallery having started its working life marking a wedding or a grave in ancient Greece. What it is doing now is a considerably more personal version of the same job.