Rhea Dillon, Swollen, Whole, Broken, Birthed in the Broken; Broken Birthed, Broken, Deficient, Whole—At the Black Womb's Altar, At the Black Woman's Tale, 2023. Sapele Mahogany, Calabashes. 25.4 × 160 × 25.4 cm. Courtesy the artist and Soft Opening, London. Photography Theo Christelis.
Movement 1
I expected big bodies of water to speak to me, just stand up and talk, open into a mouth somewhere and say something, to tell me the truth, tell me who’s responsible.
I sat at the shore negotiating and deciphering, back and forth, arriving and unarriving, shuffling then landing and going again.
I couldn’t tell who was speaking, the words were all there but incoherent, stacked on top of one another going all at once—was that God?
Movement 2
It came between us; atomic and overwhelming like pollen. A drop in temperature and air pressure; imperceptible until it wasn’t; a sheer and impenetrable membrane; tiny and insurmountable; turning obvious statements into ominous questions, we want the same things. Do we want the same things? Let’s get married. Let’s get married?
Movement 3
The early mornings kept me faithful, at twilight, when our desires were your own.
Full contact, in the blue light, we were an island completely governed by ourselves.
At the bewitching hour I saw you, our grooves in perfect, impossible alignment.
If God is creativity, how come this wasn’t God?
How was this not holy?
Movement 4
I remember the last time we made love
before I only wanted to love you,
before there was
less and less
daylight between
us,
familiar,
quiet,
deliberate,
pressing,
between two
people who knew
each other,
and felt something new rising
in themselves.
Sadness hung between us and on us like humidity.
Movement 5
I was carrying something, then I miscarried it. I expected some kind of alteration to me with something like that. What are you right before a mother?
Movement 6
call me
call a spade a spade
you called and said I’m engaged
I called you a bitch
you called just two months before
to say let’s call it
I called it off
whose call was this
I called you the love of my life
I called you nothing
I called on God
I called you god
you called it God
I called out my own name
Movement 7
In my fantasies I am a cannon
a sword
a scythe
a laser
Galactus
Unicron
Sekhmet
a lumberjack
an archer
a vampire
a bull terrier
I want to put my teeth into something
I want to taste blood that isn’t my own
Movement 8
Cheating grief is an infidelity, too.
I exploded, bright and self-sacrificing, kamikaze style.
Was there any of it that belonged to just us?
Movement 9
I used to be malleable
I used to be a sea sponge
I used to be soft matter
I used to be a river
I used to be vapor
inhalable
clinging
sticky
I used to be electric
crackling
I used to be open
clam-like
cracked
split all over
I used to be a petal
I used to be a dragonfly wing
I used to be liquid and s
lick all over
I used to be wet sand
for you.
Movement 10
When I couldn’t beat atrophy, I thought about letting the water swallow me. I thought about bowing down before it.
It persists if nothing else, returning to the shore time and again. Is that faith?
A God like a closed fist, where are you? A heart has broken where two or more are gathered in your name.
Movement 11
I am the sea rolling over myself salty echolocating nothing is true here for more than a wavelength how does water get to know itself this way how does water know where it is how does water not drown in itself how does water accept that it has no punctuation no body no permanence
Movement 12
I pulled myself out of my body and into my head, hiked myself up, like a dress around my shoulders. Was this how the crab felt? The whole body is the head, so it thinks all over? Or the brain and heart share the same container, so it only feels? Does the crab have a choice? Do I?
Movement 13
If my body has been chasing me
if me, the spirit, is moving fast
if I’m stretching outside of my self
if I’m retracting to avoid my
body and loss
if I’m pressing against skin
to be delivered
if the recoil is violent because
I’m pressing the wrong way
if waves are really trying to
to get away from the shore
then is birth ever going
back the way you came?
If my body had been
chasing me
if me, the spirit, was moving faster
if I was stretching outside of my self
if I was acting to avoid my
body and loss
if I was pressing against skin
to be delivered
if the recoil was violent because
I pressed the wrong way
if waves are really trying to
get away from themselves
then is birth ever going back in
Movement 14
I started my morning prayer out of habit, it just came to me.
I haven’t done that in months.
AfterwordWhen I was asked to write, I wasn’t aware that I needed to. I felt like a weapon, I was grieving. I wasn’t aware either, at the time, that I was longing to think alongside an artist that worked with solid material, perhaps a sculptor or a metalsmith.
A case was made for Rhea Dillon and the ability of her work, and abstraction more broadly, to get at the madness of mourning. Dillon is also a poet. Both of those things meant something to me.
I was struck by form and movement and shape, by the
reality of her catalogue. I saw myself in the material—crystal, glass, and mahogany—equally hard, fragile, and biological. In her practice, I recognized what I hoped to do: carve. To bring how I felt into this dimension.
I kept going back to two works included in Dillon’s exhibition,
An Alterable Terrain at the Tate Britain in London in 2023. The first,
An Unholy Trinity (the) Imaginary, Symbolic and Real because, plainly, I had questions about God. The second, and the artwork I ultimately chose to respond to,
Swollen, Whole, Broken, Birthed in the Broken; Broken Birthed, Broken, Deficient, Whole—At the Black Womb’s Altar, At the Black Woman’s Tale, because when I saw it, I thought: “Yes, that’s it.” My response to
An Unholy Trinity was cerebral, it drew me higher into my head. The latter drew me into my body, which—because of the grief—I had flown out of. The four calabashes looked like cannonballs; like shells in the ballistic and organic sense of the word; like me. Ironically, I didn’t know that the sculptures were “
a conceptual fragmentation of a Black woman’s body.” I only knew I wanted to relocate mine.
