Adela Aubuchon

Adela, like the other two women in the project, was born and raised here in Bali. She spent her days growing up in the water and learned to surf at a very young age. Her dad is from California and aimed to get Adela on a board as soon as he could. However, it wasn’t until she was 12 or 13, around the time she and Sierra first became friends, that she really took to surfing. At that time, Adela was entering small surfing competitions for young kids that focused more around building a community than actually competing. It was through that and the constant time she and her friends would spend in the water at Padang Padang Right that she really started to develop a love for surfing.

Growing up, Adela’s parents got divorced when she was still pretty young, and because of that she was not split between two cultures, but also between two households. This had an affect on her growing up and surfing was one of the places she really felt like she could take a step back from the rest of the world. Whenever life would get overwhelming she always had the ocean to go back to. It’s because of that exact reason that she tries her best to get in the water everyday in some way.

Having an identity split between two cultures left Adela feeling at times like she didn’t belong to either. Aside from surfing, one of the ways she found a sense of solace was in art. In high school is when Adela really began diving into her art. She came to love painting at that time and decided that it was what she wanted to pursue in college as well.

Art has always been Adela’s outlet to express herself and feels like that because she has this background in two vastly different cultures, it has allowed her to pull inspiration from so many different places. If is wasn’t for her being half Indonesian half American, she believes that her art wouldn’t be the same.