Rebecca Bellantoni: Day And Heavy, Judah Leaves

About

De La Warr Pavilion is pleased to present the first institutional solo exhibition of London-based artist, Rebecca Bellantoni, comprising a new body of work in our First floor gallery.

Working with moving image, installation, performance, photography, textiles, printmaking, sculpture, sound-text, and ceramics, Bellantoni (b. 1981, UK) draws from everyday occurrences and abstracts them. Through investigations into the layered lens of Black women’s writing (fiction and nonfiction), metaphysics, philosophy, religion and spirituality, geography and the aesthetics of them, Bellantoni 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 self, collective reasoning and healing thought and action.

For this new commission, Bellantoni will bring together a series of sculptural and installation works comprising ceramic, textile, wood, sound, photography and found objects. Together, they tell the story of the intergenerational relationship between the artist and her Godmother and her self-initiated exodus back to Jamaica in the late 1980’s. Shifting between the personal to 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.

The artist says: ‘With this exhibition, I hope to speak to a deeper relationship that people build with place. When I think about place, I am really thinking about social geography, the conditions that people live in, about how communities are built and how they dissolve. Although that plays a big part in what the exhibition is, I have chosen in this exhibition to step back from the harsh realities to look at what happens and how people find their way through those experiences’.

Kindly supported by the Elephant Trust

Special thanks:
Flatland Projects

In recent news, Rebecca Bellantoni has been awarded an Arts Foundation Futures Award becoming a Visual Art Fellow.