Devotion
Featuring Dineo Seshee Bopape, Donald Rodney, and Rosa Nguyen
The land is rich with sacred meaning for people across all cultures. It inspires contemplation and is often a means of reference for understanding our identity.
Works in this section find material ways to express divine connection, collective dreams, and temporal spaces.
The artists create sculptures and installations to manifest the connection between the earthly realm and spiritual plane.
Layered with references stretching from the soil to the stars, Dineo Seshee Bopape creates an immersive environment of material metaphors in her installation Sedibeng (it comes with the rain) (spear). Connecting earthly concepts with spiritual lore, Bopape unites strands of thought in her installation of encoded, representative, and suggestive objects.
Like a constellation, the work finds patterns in the artist’s expansive knowledge of traditional healing, the body and earth. Bopape stages twisting metal sculptures, dried herbs, photo-slides of a woman moulding clay and reflective lights to create a sensorial space.
The South African artist plucks ecological associations from her homeland to explore the powers at work in colonial histories, contemporary territories, and earthly injustices.
Donald Rodney’s monolithic structure Land of Milk and Honey II eulogises a soured dream. The glass case, standing at head height, frames a decaying sludge of copper coins, milk, and honey putrifying over time.
Taking its title from a passage in the Old Testament book of Exodus, the sculpture actualises the rotting process of an abandoned hope. Made for his late father, Rodney’s curdling sculpture materialises the disillusion of the Windrush generation, and the shattering of their dreams of a prosperous life in Britain.
Made when his own health was deteriorating, the Land of Milk and Honey II intertwines the artist’s meditations on bodily decay with Britain’s societal decay. Contrasting and connecting the personal and the political, the bodily and the environmental, Rodney’s work draws from national imaginations to evoke a personal narrative.
The artwork was included in ‘We are Birmingham’ an exhibition at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery from April to November 2022. The exhibition displayed artworks from the collection which resonated with young people of colour and sought to highlight the diverse heritage of the city. Having been born in the city, Rodney’s sculpture presents a complex relationship with the dreams of a previous generation.
Rosa Nguyen’s installation Sanctuary creates a space strewn with naturally inspired ceramic and glass forms and dried flowers. The small seedpod-like sculptures nestle between arching root-like limbs on a forest-like floor.
Nguyen brings together spiritual and natural elements arranged in a composition referencing the Japanese art of flower arrangement (Ikebana) and Zen dry landscape gardens. Nguyen’s ceramic and glass sculptures materially expand the existing collection of paintings, prints and drawings which depict the natural world and tended gardens at Touchstones Rochdale.
Meditating on fluctuating states, the installation plays with the order and disorder of nature and the relationship between outside and indoor spaces. Delicately site-specific, the sculptural elements balance as if to communicate nature’s transience. Interested by Animism, the belief that natural phenomena such as land and the creatures on it possess spirits, Nguyen reveals the life of the dry and still installation.
Explore the Exhibition
Landed
