An Alterable Terrain, the solo exhibition by Rhea Dillon at Tate Britain from May 2023 until January 2024, brought together new and existing sculptures as a conceptual fragmentation of a Black woman’s body. Probing material histories and Black feminist epistemologies, 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. 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 publication showcases Dillon’s poetically insightful work. Edited by Dillon it features her poetry, alongside newly commissioned texts, posthumously published poems from the poetry archives in Jamaica, and illustrations of the exhibition and individual works. Published by Tate Publishing, An Alterable Terrain features contributions from Patricia Noxolo, Barbara Ferland, Zoé Samudzi, Vanessa Onwuemezi, Françoise Vergès, Katherine McKittrick, and Martine Syms. This powerful 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.
