Live on Zoom, Free.

QUAD is delighted to present a live talk by our current International Digital Fellow and forthcoming exhibiting artist, Uma Breakdown. Uma will be in conversation with Amy Hale and Belladonna Paloma. Uma comments:

“For this event, I’ve invited two people whose ideas I admire a great deal, to share some of their research and talk together about borders, binding, and lines of flight.

Amy Hale, Atlanta-based writer and critic: The number three has a long history as a magical number in both esoteric symbolism and also in active spell work. In magical operations, it signifies a perfect set, a binding completeness, a comforting wholeness. How does it feel to disrupt the perceived unity of three and why might this be a powerful strategy? Belladonna Paloma, artist & witch living in Shetland: Taking her lead from London’s Crossbone’s Graveyard with the phrase ‘outcast dead’, Belladonna is interested in these portal places as a means of offering love to those of our dead who were historically denied it (folks deemed criminal; disabled folks; gender non-conformists; queers; sex workers; single mothers; suicidal deaths).

Uma Breakdown is an artist in Gateshead: Alongside my more gifted friends, I want to also share some of my research around guilt, love, and other such binding pacts.

Speaker Bios

Amy Hale is an Atlanta-based writer and critic. Recent writing includes Ithell Colquhoun: Genius of the Fern Loved Gully (Strange Attractor), Sex Magic: Diagrams of Love, (Tate Publishing), and she was the editor of Essays on Women in Western Esotericism: Beyond Seeresses and Sea Priestesses (Palgrave) Hale is an Honorary Research Fellow with Falmouth University, a trustee of the UK Charity Rediscovering Art by Women, and is a member of the British Art Network.

Belladonna Paloma is an artist & witch living in Shetland, UK. She paints, tattoos, makes games and writes poetry. Her work is inhabited by toilet gods, crossroads, boglands, grief rituals and necromancy all in devotion to the beings we mistakenly name ‘waste’. Her work has been exhibited by: IMT Gallery, London (2023); The Overkill Festival, Netherlands, in collaboration with Uma Breakdown (2023); Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, in collaboration with Rabindranath Bhose and Oren Shoesmith (2023); and Gropius Bau, Berlin, in collaboration with Daniella Valz Gen (2023), and Gaada, Shetland (2023).

This event will take place on Zoom. A link to the Zoom meeting will be sent on booking, and again two hours before the talk.