Periwinkle by Adebunmi Gbadebo

Cyanotype, screenprint with handmade inks, lithograph, and collage

Highpoint Editions is honored to release Periwinkle, a new print by artist Adebunmi Gbadebo. This new print combining cyanotype, screenprint, and lithograph pushes the materiality of contemporary print by incorporating hand gathered soil and raw indigo to create an image where land, memory, and material speak together.

What began as a conceptually simple intention, to make a print of a flower, quickly unfolded into something far more layered, rigorous, and alive. When Adebunmi Gbadebo entered the Highpoint Editions studio in Minneapolis, the flower became a portal rather than a subject, a way to return to True Blue Plantation in Fort Motte, South Carolina, where her maternal lineage was enslaved and where the land itself still carries memory. The periwinkle, chosen for this work, is not ornamental. It is a witness. Thriving in acidic soil altered by decomposed bodies, it has long served as an informal grave marker, especially in forgotten or overgrown burial grounds of the enslaved. Descendant communities, anthropologists, or archaeologists frequently look for periwinkle as an indicator of human remains lost within the earth and at True Blue Cemetery, a seven acre site now largely reclaimed by woodland, these small blooms signal the presence of a hidden history.

The print collapses three images of the cemetery into a single, compressed surface, mirroring the way history itself is layered, buried, and obscured. A cyanotype forms the foundation, while the middle and top layers are screenprinted using ink made from indigo and red clay gathered directly from True Blue Cemetery, embedding the physical site into the image itself. Between each layer, white silhouettes of flattened periwinkle plants are placed with intention, alternately revealing and concealing what lies beneath.

A single lithograph of a periwinkle bloom is collaged on top, camouflaged within the landscape, echoing how periwinkle operates in the wild: quiet, persistent, easy to miss, and impossible to ignore once seen. In this work, periwinkle becomes both material and metaphor, a delicate visual language through which absence is made visible and land becomes a marker of lives lived and lost.

The making of the print mirrored the depth of its meaning. Pushing materiality further than ever before was not just a challenge but a necessity, and one of the many reasons Highpoint was drawn to working with Gbadebo. To screenprint with soil, Highpoint sourced an industrial spice grinder to mill the red clay finely enough to pass through the mesh of a screen, only to discover a second, unexpected hurdle. Left untreated, the soil began to grow organic material. Baking it became essential, a lesson learned through experimentation rather than instruction. That trial and error process, full of surprises, setbacks, and discoveries, became part of the work’s DNA. The result is a print that feels as intentional as it is elemental, carrying the physical, historical, and emotional weight of the site it comes from. Periwinkle exemplifies a work where land, memory, and material speak together.