Glasgow International Festival of Contemporary Art
 

Belladonna Paloma

A photo of a sunny bogland landscape, golden brown in late afternoon sunlight. At the top text reads ‘Corpores Infames’ in a font made from drawings of nude people shaping their bodies into the letters. Shadows of 3 people creep across the grass on the left foreground. In the centre foreground two pools of water sit in the bogland. On the right foreground a photoshopped black ink drawing of a bog butter container on its side appears like it has spilled its contents out into the pool.
Belladonna Paloma, Oren Shoesmith and Rabindranath X Bhose, Corpores Infames, 2024
Courtesy of the artists
A photograph showing a sun-bleached greyish lambs skull against a white wall. On the top of the forehead of the skull, in bright fluorescent pink paint, an egg with its shadow behind it has been painted.
Belladonna Paloma, Egg Anointed Skull, 2023
Courtesy of the artist. Photograph by Peter Otto
a close up of a person performing in front of a green hill with an old stone building on top. He is covered with a muddy mixture, wearing a pink neckerchief with a bare chest. His head is tilted, his eyes are closed and he looks blissful. There are two people watching him in the background.
Rabindranath X Bhose, Body of the Bog, 2023
Courtesy of the artist. Photograph by Sean Patrick Campbell
An oval ceramic plate on a white wall. The ceramic is a tan brown colour with an inky black drawing of a monk bending over a stone dolman in prayer. In front there are two crutches in the grass, crossed over each other. Above, some clouds and a round moon are visible.
Oren Shoesmith, 2023
Courtesy of the artist. Photograph by Rabindranath X Bhose

Rabindranath X Bhose,  Belladonna Paloma and Oren Shoesmith are three friends and co-conspirators who form a boggy trans crip collective. They collaborate on bog-related projects, in devotion to the ecological potency of wetlands.

The images shown above represent the Glasgow International 2024 project that Belladonna Paloma is participating in, as well as the artist’s individual practice.

Belladonna Paloma is an artist, poet & trans witch living on a remote croft in the Shetland Isles. She paints, tattoos, writes poetry, and makes computer games. Her work is into listening to faeries, how divination disturbs linear time, grief rituals, toilet gods and necromancy. Bella makes art as acts of devotion. This devotion has most recently centred on Shetland’s boglands, and wetlands more generally, continuing her interest in the politics and mysticism of what we choose to call ‘waste’. Some places her work has been published and exhibited by: The Overkill Festival, Netherlands, in collaboration with Uma Breakdown (2023), IMT Gallery, London (2023), Collective, Edinburgh, in collaboration with Rabindranath X Bhose and Oren Shoesmith (2023), Vital Capacities (2023), Sluice Magazine (2023), Museum of Contemporary Art, London (2023), TISSUEPAPER Magazine (2023), Gropius Bau, Berlin, in collaboration with Daniella Valz Gen (2023), Gaada, Shetland (2023), Sticky Fingers Publishing (2023), Art Licks (2022), Two Queens, Leicester (2022), Abingdon Studios Project Space, Blackpool (2022), Cariboo Projects, Bristol (2021), and Supernormal Festival, Oxfordshire (2019). Her book-length poem about Bigfoot, There’s always things falling out the sky, was published by Pink Sands Studio Press, 2021

Projects