Belladonna Paloma

Belladonna Paloma is an artist, poet & witch living on a remote croft in Shetland, UK. 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, as well as wetlands more generally, continuing her interest in the politics and mysticism of what we choose to call ‘waste’. 

In 1995, aged 11, Bella bought her first album on CD, the Red Hot Chilli Peppers 'One Hot Minute', at a record shop in Penzance. She listened to it once, and the next day exchanged it for a copy of 'Live Through This' by Hole. It was in this moment she knew she was trans.

Her book length poem about Bigfoot, There’s Always Things Falling Out The Sky, a collaboration with Roxy Topia & Paddy Gould, was published last year with Pink Sands Studio. Some of the work she’s most proud of is ink on bodies, but a few other places it has been published, shown or performed over the years are The Overkill Festival, Netherlands, in collaboration with Uma Breakdown (2023), IMT Gallery, London (2023), Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, in collaboration with Rabindranath Bhose and Oren Shoesmith (2023), Vital Capacities (2023), Sluice Magazine (2023), Museum of Contemporary Art, London (2023), TISSUEPAPER Magazine (2023), AMBIT (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), Supernormal Festival, Oxfordshire, in collaboration with Lucie Akerman (2019), and Arnolfini, Bristol (2017).