Shetland-based artist Belladonna Paloma uses a mixture of unconventional materials and witchcraft to create an art show that explores both divine and abject representations of the transgender body. Generator Projects, an arts and events space in Dundee, will be transformed into a necropolis and reading room, ready for audiences to confront ideas about death and waste. We sat down with Belladonna to find out more about how divination can be used to produce art, and how speaking to the dead can teach us a lot about our own lived existence on earth.
What inspired you to create this exhibition?
Belladonna Paloma: So, the starting points were the Book of Job, and both the musical and book versions of Wicked. There’s this great section at the start of Wicked where there’s a group of people talking about Elphaba, and they are saying things like ‘I heard she sleeps with women’ or ‘I heard she’s actually a man’ or ‘I heard that she’s a hermaphrodite’. I was really intrigued by this idea of a witch being this green-skinned woman who people can project all their fears onto, all of the things they see as abject or unlovable.
Then the Book of Job [reference] is slightly off-kilter, but the title of the exhibition is taken from one of its lines. Someone is saying to Job, ‘you should come to the grave in full vigour, like a sheaf of corn at the height of its season’. It’s a really powerful description of how to approach being alive – to come to the grave when you are full of life. For me, I feel that trans people in particular have an intimacy with the kinds of death that we can experience whilst being alive – death as change and the death of the old you.
What can we expect to see at the show?
Belladonna: I had a lot of fun making this work – some of the materials I used were blood, cups of tea, nettles, flour, onion skins, turmeric, cider vinegar, salt, sheep bones, Irn Bru, cat sick, egg yolk, slug slime, salt, and piss. A lot of these were very much in the background – the cat sick was an accident that I immediately cleaned up! But I was interested in feeding the artwork. If I was cooking a meal, I would use the leftover vegetables for a dye or wash. It was a slow, long process of living with the artwork and sharing a life with it.
A lot of your work deals with death and necromancy– why is it that you’re drawn to this theme?
Belladonna: My way into this is through grief. Necromancy is, broadly speaking, the practice of communicating with the dead, and to me it’s an act of love. I’m really interested in how care and love are tied up with how we grieve, and how that can be both for the living and the dead. Whenever I get lost with making artwork, I always try to remind myself who it’s for – it’s for the dead. A lot of what I’m trying to do at the moment is to create eulogies and memorials to those who have not historically been allowed to be remembered. To not be remembered is in itself a kind of second death.
Tell me more about how this connects to divination, and how you use that in your art practice.
Belladonna: Necromancy is not only about talking, but about listening. There’s a process of introducing yourself or bringing gifts to let these entities know that you mean well. With any kind of friendship, it goes both ways, and you have to listen to what they have to say back to you.
Some people aren’t given the chance to speak up whilst alive, so to listen to them after they’ve died is quite powerful.
Belladonna: Yes, absolutely. When you’re listening to anyone, you’re taking a leap of faith and stepping into the unknown. The whole point is to find something you’ve not heard before. The dead have wild perspectives on things, you know? They don’t have bodies, and they’re not bound by things like time and space in the same way that we are. They are fascinated by human bodies and that feeds into my practice. We have so much shame around all the smells and liquids of the body; those are the bits that we shouldn’t talk about, but they prove we are living beings.
How does living in Shetland inform your practice?
Belladonna: I’ve only been here for two and a half years now, so a relatively short amount of time, but it has wildly changed my practice in a lot of ways. I’m living in such close proximity to a radically different landscape to what I’ve known before, like wetlands. It has made me lean into the abject, as there’s a much greater intimacy with waste without the industrial structures that get rid of it for you. My work got messier and now I’m a lot more interested in blurring boundaries.
The Grave in Full Vigour will be on from November 9th till December 15th at Generator Projects, 25/26 Mid Wynd Industrial Estate, Dundee, DD1 4JG. There will be a reading group alongside the show on 27th November at Hapworks, Castle Street, Dundee. More info here
