Davinia-Ann Robinson’s new body of work draws on embodied knowledge cultivated within Black and Brown bodies, encountered through practices of stillness – exploring how these encounters might become radical acts of claiming oneself and transforming racial trauma. The research will examine Black feminist theories – presencing and fugitivity practised within individual and collective practices of stillness and relationships to land.
Through creating sculptures, soundworks and performances, the project explores embodied self-care and liberation, incorporating somatic breath and movement practices, and new engagements with clay – a material used within Robinson’s art practice as a methodology and symbol of ancestral and land displacement, and engagements of grounding. This work is framed by Black Feminist thinking that considers ways of creating embodied understanding – sitting with remembrance, being with grief and being held by the earth.
Biography
Davinia-Ann Robinson (b. Wolverhampton, lives and works in London) is an artist of Afro-Caribbean and Indo-Caribbean descent. Her art practice and research are explored through sculpture, sound, writing and performance. She examines how tactility, presencing and fugitivity work to form an undoing of colonial and imperial frameworks of extractions through which nature and the bodies of black, brown, and indigenous people are articulated within colonialism.
Davinia holds a BA at Goldsmiths College, London (2010); and an MFA at The Slade School of Art, London (2021). Recent exhibitions include Fugitive Seeds, CCA Derry Londonderry, Northern Ireland (2022); Raw Nerves, Hannah Barry Gallery, London (2022); Residency 11:11 – Gathering, London (2022); distinction between felt flesh – San Mei Gallery, London (2022); some intimacy, (a mediation), Rotten TV, Jupiter Artland, Edinburgh (2022); Radical Landscapes, Tate Liverpool (2022); Metabolic time / Am meitibileach, Project Arts Centre, Dublin (2022); connections unplugged, bodies rewired – das weisse haus, Vienna (2021); Our Other Us, Art Encounters Biennial, Romania (2021); New Contemporaries, Firstsite, Colchester and South London Gallery, London (2021); Being Here, Kupfer, London (2021); I Am Unsure As To If It Is Still Alive, Quench, Margate (2021); Tactile Belonging, Mimosa House, London (2021); Bold Tendencies, London (2020); Freedom Is Outside the Skin, Kunsthal 44Møen, Denmark (2020). Recent residencies include Artist in Residence, Schools Programme, Tate Modern & Tate Britain (2022-23); Rupert, Vilnius, Lithuania (2022); and Artist Educator, Supersmashers, South London Gallery, London (2019–20).
