ATLA is pleased to present The Poetics of Place: Vamba Bility and Shun Kadohashi, a two-person exhibition.

Both artists let materials carry meaning before words do. Through painting, textiles, found objects, sculpture, and ceramics, their practices explore how everyday materials can hold histories, emotions, and connections beyond language.

Objects are never simply objects; they carry traces of touch, labor, landscape, and the lives they encounter. Across continents and distinct lived experiences, Bility and Kadohashi explore material as a vessel for memory, place, and belonging.

For Bility, materials become a record of movement and transformation, embodying knowledge and exchange. Born in Côte d'Ivoire, with ties to Liberia and Guinea, before moving to New England in the United States, Bility works across a multidisciplinary practice that reflects the fluid experience of identity itself—a life shaped by movement and the continual reconfiguration of home. He brings together fragments of material histories, allowing mark making, torn canvas, stitched textiles, found objects, and repaired forms to echo care, resilience, and renewal. A tear is not concealed; it becomes part of the story. A broken object is not discarded; it becomes a site of transformation. Through this process, Bility creates works where fragments become a meditation on interiority while also speaking to broader ideas of connection, memory, and time.

Kadohashi's ceramics emerge from an equally intimate relationship with his surroundings. Based in the coastal village of Shirahama, Japan, where he divides his time between making art and working as a fisherman, he no longer sees making as separate from living. Clay is not a vehicle for self-expression but part of the same rhythm as tending rice fields, fishing, raising children, and embracing uncertainty. Playful yet deeply refined, his forms carry the rhythms of the sea, the quiet beauty of imperfection, and a profound connection between the human hand and the natural world.

Together, Bility and Kadohashi reveal how material itself becomes a language—not a substitute for words, but another way of understanding the world. Their works invite us to consider how materials can communicate what words sometimes cannot: the traces of where we come from, the places that shape us, and the relationships we build through making.