Rhea Dillon: An Alterable Terrain

Probing material histories and Black feminist epistemologies, Rhea 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.  

Opening at Tate Britain from May 2023, Rhea Dillon’s solo Art Now exhibition, An Alterable Terrain, brings together her new and existing sculptures as a conceptual fragmentation of a Black woman’s body. It examines material histories, theories of minimalism and abstraction, and Black feminist epistemologies to evoke elements of an amorphous body, including the eyes, mouth, soul and hands. 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 book showcases Dillon’s poetically insightful work. It features Dillon’s poetry, alongside new writings and reprinted extracts by her and other contributors, and illustrations of the exhibition and individual works. This powerful new 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.