A flag for those without land

Caroline Honorien: You have been working on your Vexilla series, in which the flag becomes a site for thinking about collective identity without territory. How does this work navigate both a diasporic sense of belonging and the exclusionary or violent forms of far-right politics that are often associated with flags?

Rhea Dillon: The Vexilla series wasn't initially intended to be a series. It emerged more as a response born out of exhaustion with reality – and as an attempt to speak through that condition from a positionality that is becoming increasingly shared and understood by many.

I painted the first work, Vexilla Maurus, in 2021. Both the US and the UK had at that point been subjected to the Trump presidency and successive conservative governments. What felt particularly concerning was the surprise expressed by many people towards these political results, as though these structures had not already maintained an incremental stranglehold on us for years. My friends and I had been conscious of the rise of the far-right over the previous decade. From 2022 onwards, there was also an increasing focus on discourse around land, around Palestine and around other countries across the world facing their own forms of genocide and far-right politics. All of this was already bubbling within my thoughts before this artwork.

My practice often engages with the diaspora — specifically the African diaspora, which I’m part of — and I am also deeply interested in vexillology, the study of flags. Vexilla derives from the Roman vexillum, meaning a little flag, sail or banner. Thinking about the diaspora moving across the globe, forced to roam, I began to imagine us as these little sails scattered across the Atlantic. In Latin, the designation used to describe anything or anyone as ‘dark’ or ‘Black compounds’ is maurus. Thus, Vexilla Maurus is 'little black sails,' or more specifically, 'little dark-skinned sails.'

The most prevalent colour found in flags is red, which usually symbolises bloodshed, sacrifice, power or revolution. Thinking about how other artists engage with Black Britishness and American Blackness in their work, I wanted to ask: what would a flag representing the diaspora look like? What does a flag look like that speaks to not having land, not having a stake in land?

The second work, Vexilla Sumpta (2022), was where I first began using anti-climb paint in the series, which creeps across the surface of the painting, swallowing the right-hand side in an almost didactic way. The work is spatially arranged as a flag being gradually subsumed, as a sort of index of the rise of far-right politics today. And now, in Vexilla Onerosus (2023), the paint almost fully overtakes the surface. At present, there is a clear, widespread awareness that we are living under forms of fascist governance spreading across Europe and the Americas. We are weighted down by it, caught within it. Onerosus translates as 'burden' in Latin.

CH: You often refer to Blackness as a ground, as a terrain. Can you speak about the relationship between Blackness and the environment?

RD: When I think about terrain and ground, it comes specifically from Katherine McKittrick's scholarship, particularly Demonic Grounds – Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (2006).  When I read other people's scholarship, the parts that speak to me are the sections where they create a framework, language, or theory for something I have already felt — they name something I have been feeling but didn't know how to put into words. To give reality to those feelings are so important, especially when it comes to Black women's thought, ways of processing and speech. 

Grounding is crucial when you are part of the diaspora and when you return to whichever motherland you are related to. For me specifically, grounding is about understanding that a terrain held my family – still holds my family – nurtured my family, nurtured incredible revolutionaries who roamed through the mountains in Jamaica. Recently I’ve created a very literal relationship to the environment by incorporating soil from that land in my work, from the area where my great-great-great-grandfather owned land. Land that still belongs to members of my family today. 

I think an artwork has the opportunity to be both matter and didactic, where matter can be at once a tangible object and something that instructs: like my use of soil or the anti-climb paint. In other words, the didactic, or the concept itself, can become object-like – like a pronunciation only fully realised when it hits the tongue. Expanding Blackness as a framework is about the tongue, about the object, about the reality of being objectified.

CH: You have expressed your frustration at cinema and video's ‘desire for the full stop.’ In the Vexilla series, the painting never settles, the paint never dries. Do you approach painting as a time-based practice, and how has that way of thinking shaped your video practice, particularly in works such as (Working Title) Browning 2025 Browning (2021)?

RD: I have made videos in the past, but I wouldn't consider myself to have a video practice. (Working Title) Browning 2025 (2021) is sculptural in the sense that its display requirements demand that it be projected directly onto the wall, filling whatever dimensions the exhibition space allows. The video carries audio of dark-skinned Black women speaking about what brown means to them, what it can hold. It was inspired partly by the theory that, by some future year, we will all be brown people regardless of origin — something that is not necessarily going to happen, especially with the rise of far-right politics. But I find those kinds of claims interesting to challenge or probe. What does that mean for those of us who have been brown this entire time?

With the anti-climb paint, there is something in the way the material can transfer onto another person — onto an 'Other', in a context where 'Other' is often framed as the diaspora. What does it mean to place this architectural tool of surveillance onto someone who doesn't yet know what that Otherness looks like? To activate the mechanism of that othering and cause a kind of psychic break? There is also something in using a paint that never dries where extending the life of an artwork – not towards perpetuity, but towards demonstrating that it is actually living, and drawing attention to the life it has already lived – that greatly interests me.

One of my ongoing obsessions is the question of how art can be time-based. There is this contested idea, particularly within the art market, that the object is meant to exist forever. I find that reductive – a stoic, almost patriarchal notion of the object held in desire for a position of power over other things. I'm interested in destabilising that ground.

CH: Going back to the seventies and the eighties, and the Adrian Pipers and the Lorna Simpsons, Black women artists employed conceptual practices to question identity. Their work subverted notions of legibility; they used text and made the body visible while also diffracting it into signs. Your work inhabits such minimalist and conceptual strategies through seriality, abstraction and found material, but it is also characterised by a refusal of figuration. Rather than erasing the body, you seem to disperse it entirely into materiality. Can you speak about the distinction between Blackness as a legible surface and Blackness as medium?

RD: I really love the word diffraction — it's one I've been drawn to for the past few years. I wrote a poem to think through it and used it as the prompt for the contributors I invited for my year of guest editing Montez Press’ Interjection Calendar (2024). I wanted to question what it means to not simply reflect, but to move through something, to multiply through it? How do you diffract into the world rather than just reflect back? Because we need to change so much of the world whilst understanding it is our home. It's a question I don't have a singular answer to — hence working it out through poetry and poethics. 

Blackness is very much like that. It can part a room, and it can also engulf a room shrouding it in darkness. Which is essentially to say: Blackness is always the room. There is so much to say between Blackness as surface and Blackness as medium; that conversation is probably too large even for the page this will be printed on. But it is material, weighted by materiality. Is the object the thing, or is the object the tool, or is it both simultaneously? 

The eighties are a really odd and interesting period. It is often remembered as sparkly and somewhat nonsensical, when in fact so many ideas were being worked through in discourse. Adrian Piper and Lorna Simpson are two very different Black women thinkers, both extraordinary in what they articulate. Piper's early space-based works were doing something quite conceptually radical. I have a book of her texts where she is genuinely just working things out, unafraid of her own position, both linguistically and artistically. The spirit of that moment probably influences me more than the works themselves.

CH: You are a visual artist whose practice is imbued with theory, and you are also a poet. Do you see theory and poetry as separate, or are they truly bound together? How do you approach them? Do they both mutate within your writing and your art practice?

RD: Poetry and theory are both just paradigms — considered separate communities, but both extend what community and belief can mean. Theory is ultimately pulling things together to create a picture of what has happened, where we are, and why. Poetry does the same. They feel more like allies, combinations that strengthen one another. I would not say they fully dissolve into each other, though ideas do eventually have to dissolve. At some point, you have to move into the materiality of the thing itself. Like jazz musicians entering that fluid state, all the theory becomes the condition that allows you to arrive there. 

I’m very obsessed right now with Barthes' The Pleasure of the Text (1973), and with the question of what the text is, what it does, what its dysfunctions might be, and how all of that can combine to produce a new, strange world. That is where theory and poetry share a place for me.

It also reflects how my brain works. When I was making more lens-based work, I would write little notes in an attempt to find the language for what I was thinking so I could communicate that to the video or photo crew. Friends said they read like poems. I hadn’t been trying to write poetry, but it was a good example of the importance of listening to what shows up. Reading other people's scholarship can have the same poetic effect. Françoise Vergès, for instance—her writing on the visibility and invisibility of Black and brown cleaners and workers—struck me as poetic language within a theoretical text, giving presence to forms of existence that systemic analysis had not yet named. 

Theory and poetry, together or separately, have a great capacity to speak through—and attest to—what needs to be said in these times. That is another way of being present with the work.

Rhea Dillon (b. 1996, London) lives and works between London, UK and New York, USA. This interview was conducted on 26 February 2026 via video call by Caroline Honorien, co-curator of Video Killed the Radio Star: The 1980s and their Cultural Echoes at Mudam Luxembourg (12 June – 11 October 2026), in which Dillon’s work is included. 

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