Rhea Dillon and the Caribbean Poethic
Through abstraction, gesture and material, Dillon develops a language for approaching Black diasporic histories
By Dionne Walsh
By Dionne Walsh
I first meet Rhea Dillon over Zoom, she in New York, I in London. She is sitting in the studio as an Elaine G. Weitzen Program Fellow at the Whitney Museum. She speaks softly, with a quiet confidence and considered cadence to her words.
Born and raised in South London with her mum and grandmother, Dillon is an artist, writer, and poet whose practice spans sculpture, painting, olfaction and a wide range of materials. A Central Saint Martins graduate, her work seeks to “articulate an aesthetic of diasporic Blackness grounded in postcolonial nonbeing.”
In 2023, Dillon presented An Alterable Terrain at Tate Britain, her first institutional solo exhibition. The show brought together new and existing sculptures as a conceptual fragmentation of a Black woman’s body and its physical, reproductive, and intellectual labour that’s foundational to the British empire, marking a significant moment in her developing practice.
Perhaps your favourite artist’s favourite artist, there’s an in-depth coolness to Dillon, from her personal style to her cultural fluency and instinctive grasp of the zeitgeist. Her practice moves through a wider network of contemporary Black creativity, intersecting with fashion, performance, and independent cultural archives. Often styled by Jamaican-Caymanian designer Jawara Alleyne, Dillon’s published work also features in Solange Knowles’ Saint Heron Digital Archive Library, which documents her 2021 performance Catgut — The Opera.
“From an early age, I had a love for learning and interacting with people via that discourse-based way,” she tells me. This interest in conversation and exchange has followed her into adulthood, informing her practice.
When asked to trace the roots of her creative language, Dillon turns to the idea of “going to ground,” a phrase she encountered through the work of anthropologist Vanessa Agard-Jones and her lecture Gone to Ground, presented as part of a weekend of talks at the Loophole of Retreat in Venice. The phrase offers a different way of thinking about creative origins, one that moves beyond a straightforward genealogy. For Dillon, it brings her Jamaican heritage into focus, alongside the history of the triangular slave trade.
She distinguishes this ancestral lineage from a more personal sense of creative rooting: an impulse towards art that she cannot locate in a particular moment or place, but has felt persistently connected to throughout her life.
Creative lineage extends beyond ancestry into the texts and thinkers with whom she remains in dialogue, even those long passed. “I often talk about the people that I read, people that I’m in conversation with,” she muses, “and that’s not to say that I know them all.” Drawing on her Roman Catholic upbringing, she sometimes refers to the texts that have shaped her practice as her “Bible books.”
Among them are The Heart of the Race by Beverley Bryan, Stella Dadzie and Suzanne Scafe; Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye; Katherine McKittrick’s Demonic grounds, which explores Black women’s relationships to geography and struggle; and Stuart Hall’s The Fateful Triangle. Together, these texts offer a glimpse into the intellectual foundation of Dillon’s work.
Speaking about her material choices, which feel loaded with memory and symbolism, she details a process of remembering that takes place through reading and conversation. The people whose work she encounters, she explains, often articulate experiences she has already felt or lived as a racialised person.
She begins to think of this process as “re-membering,” not simply recalling the past, but bringing things back together, or putting them into view. Moving between dismembering and re-membering, she considers how knowledge and experience can be assembled anew through the words of others. It is an idea she arrives at as she speaks, acknowledging that she has not quite thought it through in these terms before.
Yet for Dillon, bringing histories into view does not necessarily mean making everything explicit. “Abstraction offers me clarity. It also offers me silo,” she declares, looking off towards an untitled piece of work that she tells me is personal and pertinent to her family in Jamaica. She goes on to ruminate withholding as a condition of survival, connecting refuge, marronage and diasporic histories. For Dillon, what is left unsaid can hold its own form of knowledge. One that does not always need to be made accessible to everyone.
The cut-crystal pieces extend this consideration of movement and displacement. Dillon had collected them in Marseille and transported them without protective packaging, anticipating that some would break along the way. The resulting fragments speak to the violence experienced by Black bodies across the diaspora. This breakage “a release of souls.”
Notably, the relationship between material and memory is seen beyond The Sombre Majesty. Sapele mahogany recurs constantly throughout Dillon’s practice, appearing in sculptural works such as An Unholy Trinity (the) Imaginary, Symbolic and Real (2022) and the more recent Yoked (2026). Indigenous to West Africa, mahogany carries the weight of colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade, pointing to questions of ancestry and inheritance within her material practice.
These concerns resurface in Leaning Figures (2025), a series of wall-mounted sculptures for which Dillon received the Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel. Reworking the forms of the Caribbean dinnerware cabinet and museum vitrine, the works house resin-cast crystal plates in sapele mahogany and glass boxes. Some are coated in molasses, others in Jamaican soil. The cabinet’s association with both boat and casket re-establish the movement of Black bodies across water, whilst the enclosed plates are reimagined as Black bodies at rest. Dillon continues to interrogate how objects are displayed and understood.
With a practice so absorbed in theory and abstraction, the deeper meanings of Dillon’s work can be easy to miss. Though, her work is not so abstracted from the communities and experiences that inform it. Her works speaks to a Caribbean and Jamaican vernacular, of Black and Brown women, and Black people more broadly. Asked how she would define her practice to someone unfamiliar with her work, Dillon reveals that she is investing in shaping and engaging with what she calls a “Caribbean poethic.” This encompasses her work across different mediums, and travels beyond language in its singular sense to imbue the emotive and what she calls “addictive.”
This thinking comes into focus in Gestural Poetics (2024), where she explores how gesture and repetition might alter the meanings attached to language. “The title actually came through when I was working on those pieces first,” she tells me. “I was trying to think through language, the space itself, and how I could change the definition of the word through a repetition, in the same way that advertising has this mass repetition effect. So, then you believe in something like propaganda, in any kind of way. And so, trying to move it from a derogatory term to a word or term that means a shield.”
This thickening also took place outside the sculptures themselves, through a reading room and accompanying reader publication that brought the work into conversation with writers and thinkers like Stuart Hall, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Vanessa Onwuemezi, and Sam Selvon. The exhibition expanded the space around her work, creating additional routes into its ideas without necessarily resolving their ambiguities. Across both exhibitions, her poethic emerges less as a fixed definition than as an ongoing process of reworking language, material, and meaning.
In Heads (2025-26), presented at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York, Dillon revisits sculptural forms explored in Leaning Figures, placing them within the institution’s library. Against its wooden bookshelves, the works sit alongside a plethora of texts by writers and thinkers including W.E.B. DuBois, James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks and Édouard Glissant, as well archival materials such as Langston Hughes’ 1932 poem, Goodbye, Christ.
The sculptures and print works enter into dialogue with the collection, bringing questions of literary representation and archival absence into the space. Here, the library itself becomes part of the work. By introducing voices outside of the institution’s established anthology, Dillon challenges whose histories are preserved, as well as the limits of the archive as a means of presenting lived experience.
Reflecting on the possibilities of working within established institutions, Dillon regards the gesture as a “Trojan horse.” “You bring something into the space, but you keep the door ajar for someone behind you.”
Yet her understanding of the archive goes beyond institutional collections. I ask her whether she sees her practice as part of a lineage or in resistance to an existing canon. “I would say my practice would be doing both,” she replies. “I don’t believe in archives just being the institutional box downstairs.”
For Dillon, the archive is also held in spaces like Black churches, in their architecture and capacity to hold collective memory. “I think that the domestic space is a Black archive,” she states. Rather than viewing the absence of Black histories from institutional collections as the absence of an archive altogether, she asks a more fundamental question: “What archives are you talking about?”
This understanding of the archive also relates to approach to material. Sourced from Jamaica, the natural elements in Heads carry associations with particular histories and geographies, without necessarily being able to represent them in their entirety. Their surfaces shift and decompose over time, resisting the permanence often considered with institutional collections.
Beside her exhibitions, Dillon continues to expand the contexts in which her practice operates. In Winter 2025, she launched Studio Studio as an extension of her work, and recently curated Caribbean Jazz at Whitechapel Gallery, a live response to Veronica Ryan’s Multiple Conversations. The evening explored the spirit and history of jazz across the Caribbean islands and wider archipelago.
Her sculpture will feature in the forthcoming group exhibition Material Shifts, curated by Owen Martin and Steinar Sekkingstad at Astrup Fearnley Museet in Oslo, on view until February 2027.
“Care comes through in just how I exist…how I choose to be and how I get bet better at being held by those who are thinking with me and alongside with me,” Dillon says. “Perhaps actually a life practice kind of thing.”
Through writing, critical study, and material exploration Dillon approaches art poetically, as a means of thinking otherwise. Rather than settle the meanings of inherited histories, her work keeps them open to reinterpretation.