London-based artist Davinia Ann-Robinson has been awarded the 2026 British Council Fellowship as part of the world-renowned Bundanon Artists in Residence Programme.
The British Council Residency supports contemporary arts practice by providing space for UK based artists to experiment, conceive and develop new work and ideas in the areas of nature-based and rural arts, arts as place-based climate action, creative sense-making for present and future, storytelling and narrative change, collaboration between arts and science, culture as an ally in activism and/or experiments in futures.
Davinia said: “While on residency at Bundanon, I am continuing the development of my project, ‘Through an Embodied Practice of Stillness’, which explores practices for unearthing, understanding and healing racial traumas held and distributed within Black and Brown bodies through ancestral, intergenrational and present-time encounters with white body supremacy.”
“The project draws on embodied knowledge cultivated within Black and Brown bodies, encountered through ‘somatic stillness’, and embodied engagements with land – creating sculptural installations and earthworks, which are the remains of solitary performances/practices, culminating in a publication exploring how these encounters might become practices of grief-work and spiritual activism as radical decolonial practices rooted in deep ancestral care.”
Davinia-Ann Robinson is an artist of Afro-Caribbean and Indo-Caribbean ancestry. Her art practice and research are explored through sculpture, sound, writing and performance examining how tactility, presencing and fugitivity work to form an undoing of colonial and imperial frameworks of extraction, within nature and Black, Brown, and Indigenous bodies. Encountered through corporeal and physical engagements between her body, natural materials, the interactions formed through colonial violence in global landscapes and embodied and de-colonial healing practices, research in tactility examines presencing, as an engagement of a reciprocal practice and politicised accountability grounded in the ethics of mutual care and responsibility, relating to the care of nature, care of human and non-human beings, ancestral care of those who have passed, and those who are to come. Through these engagements her work conjures acts of fugitivity as practices of refusal, creating communities of refuge and care, connecting to land, and connecting to physical and spiritual bodies.
For more information about Bundanon and Davina’s residency please visit: Davinia-Ann Robinson — Bundanon