The work begins with a question.
What if intelligence is not something we possess, but something that arises through relationship?
Ada Parris is an artist, futurist and author. She works with ancestral intelligence, material science and living systems.
Her artistic lineage draws from the Igbo tradition of Mbari, a form of art as citizenship, made in collaboration, in service of community and the living world. Mbari does not distinguish between the maker and the made, the artist and the ecosystem. Everything participates.
Cartography Is Not Home is the current body of work, shown publicly from 2026, in three movements: Past, Present and Future. Its claim is simple. Intelligence is material. It does not float above the physical world. It rises out of it.
The Ritual of Inherited Code begins with soil, DNA, sound and algorithms. Four intelligences. Four ways of reading what the ancestors left in the pattern.
- Practice
- Anti-disciplinary art · ancestral intelligence · material science
- Based
- London
- Lineage
- Igbo · Guyanese · British
- Exhibitions
- Tate Modern · The Other Art Fair · international
- Residencies
- Buckminster Fuller Institute · SBCAST · Glen Dye · UC Irvine Living Collaboratory
- Fellowship
- Honorary Fellow, Arts University Plymouth
- Contact
- adah@adahparris.com