Working with moving image, installation, performance, photography, textiles, printmaking, sculpture, sound, text, and ceramics, Rebecca Bellantoni (b. 1981, UK) draws from everyday occurrences and abstracts them. Through investigations into the layered lens and aesthetics of Black women’s writing (fiction and nonfiction), metaphysics, philosophy, religion, spirituality, and geography, she gently prises apart the concept of the accepted/expected ‘real’ and the experiential ‘real’, looking at how these removed borders may offer meditative experiences and portals to the self, collective reasoning and healing thought and action.
For her first major solo exhibition, Bellantoni brings together a series of sculptural and installation works comprising ceramic, textile, wood, sound, photography and found objects that are encountered slowly in a darkened environment. Together, these new works tell the story of the intergenerational relationship between the artist and her Godmother and the latter’s self-initiated exodus back to Jamaica in the late 1980s. Shifting between the personal and the archetypal, Bellantoni’s exhibition charts the course of The Godmother and The Child through geographical mapping, picturing various energy fields created between these two characters. As in much of the artist’s work, London is a central topographical and subterranean character, an urban space in which time and memory layer and resonate throughout generations of people living in this urban context.
Day and heavy, Judah Leaves draws upon writer Katherine McKittrick’s exploration of the lives of Black women in her book Demonic Grounds, women who, despite being considered ‘ungeographic’ through a history of displacement, continue to claim and build space. Taking this provocation to heart, Bellantoni has created an intimate environment in the gallery that charts the unassuming relationship between a working-class woman and her godchild, and the potential for the mystical to reveal itself in the everyday.
Rebecca Bellantoni: Day and heavy, Judah leaves press release
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