An Alterable Terrain, the solo exhibition by Rhea Dillon at Tate Britain from May 2023 until January 2024, brought together new and existing sculptures as a conceptual fragmentation of a Black woman’s body. Probing material histories and Black feminist epistemologies, Dillon evokes the fragments of a conceptual body ― eyes, hands, feet, mouth, soul, reproductive organs, and lungs ― in this poetic assemblage of responses to colonialism, patriarchy, and Black female labour. Viewed together, these disparate elements underline the foundational role Black women’s physical, reproductive, and intellectual labour has played in the history of the British Empire.
Accompanying this major exhibition, this publication showcases Dillon’s poetically insightful work. Edited by Dillon it features her poetry, alongside newly commissioned texts, posthumously published poems from the poetry archives in Jamaica, and illustrations of the exhibition and individual works. Published by Tate Publishing, An Alterable Terrain features contributions from Patricia Noxolo, Barbara Ferland, Zoé Samudzi, Vanessa Onwuemezi, Françoise Vergès, Katherine McKittrick, and Martine Syms.
This powerful volume illuminates the links between historical sites of dispossession and contemporaneous sites of exploitation and overwork, and underlines how structures of power – including colonialism, racial capitalism, and patriarchy – have an enduring presence in the production of Caribbean and British identities.
Rhea Dillon is an artist, writer and poet based in London.
Recent exhibitions include We looked for eyes creased with concern, but saw only veils at Sweetwater, Berlin (2023); The Sombre Majesty (or, on being the pronounced dead) at Soft Opening, London (2022); Real Corporeal at Gladstone Gallery, New York (2022); and Love at Bold Tendencies, London (2022).
She was an artist in residence at Triangle-Astérides, Marseille and previously at V.O. Curations, London, which culminated in a solo exhibition, Nonbody Nonthing No Thing and the publishing of poetry chapbook, Donald Dahmer (both 2021).
Barbara Ferland is a poet. Born in Spanish Town, Jamaica in 1919, she wrote the music for the first all-Jamaican pantomime, Busha Bluebeard (1949), and was a contributor to the BBC's Caribbean Voices in Jamaica in the 1950s, before settling in Britain in 1960.
Katherine McKittrick is Professor of Gender Studies and Canada Research Chair in Black Studies at Queen's University in Kingston, Canada.
Professor Patricia Noxolo is a geographer whose research brings together the study of international culture and in/security, using postcolonial, discursive and literary approaches to explore the spatialities of a range of Caribbean and British cultural practices. She was awarded the 2021 Royal Geographical Society (RGS) Murchison Award and is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.
Vanessa Onwuemezi is a writer living in London. She is the winner of The White Review Short Story Prize 2019 and her work has appeared in literary and art magazines, including Granta, Frieze and Prototype.
Rhea Dillon is an artist, writer and poet based in London.
Recent exhibitions include We looked for eyes creased with concern, but saw only veils at Sweetwater, Berlin (2023); The Sombre Majesty (or, on being the pronounced dead) at Soft Opening, London (2022); Real Corporeal at Gladstone Gallery, New York (2022); and Love at Bold Tendencies, London (2022).
She was an artist in residence at Triangle-Astérides, Marseille and previously at V.O. Curations, London, which culminated in a solo exhibition, Nonbody Nonthing No Thing and the publishing of poetry chapbook, Donald Dahmer (both 2021).
