RG Interview: Soleé Darrell
In celebration of the 2024 Bermuda Biennial, the Royal Gazette will be interviewing several Biennial artists over the run of the exhibition. On May 17, journalist Heather Wood profiled first-time Biennial artist Soleé Darrell. Excerpts from this article are shared below.
Soleé Darrell is a Bermudian-born artist based in Northern California. She is self taught and her work is purely intuition-driven. She explores the experience and depth of being a human in this world while connecting with other worlds through practice and meditation.
Each stroke encompasses color, vulnerability, passion, texture, and complete faith in the universe. She uses layers of mixed media to symbolize the healing of wounds and maps the unknown paths we take in life. She is forever fascinated with the idea of things we can never know about our existence, and the self-inflicted suffering that human beings can endure through generations of trying to figure it out.
Her hope is to bring some optimism to the viewer and bridge the gap between the intuitive world and the physical world.
Click here to read the full article: “Soleé’s art is a dream come true”
Regarding her unique technique, Darrell said to the Royal Gazette:
To create Release, which is now on exhibit in the Bermuda National Gallery as part of the 2024 Bermuda Biennial: Places, Presence & Poetics: An Unpacking, Ms Darrell applied dye to silk velvet.
“I had a dream one night, a very specific dream about this peach velvet, and I woke up and I was like, ‘I wonder how I could go about recreating this in real life?’ Luckily, my mother-in-law is a clothing designer. I’d been with her to this fabric store before and so I just went in and I bought the stuff that I needed.”
In her shopping cart she put white velvet and powdered dye, some of which she mixed with hot water to make liquid. She used a paintbrush to apply the mix, as well as the dye in its original form, onto the fabric.
“I decided to try to use the same techniques that I would with any other medium and see how it came out. And it just was mind-blowing to me because it came out so rich, so dimensional,” Ms Darrell said.
“I could layer and play around with both the powder and the liquid form in a way that I can’t really do with acrylic paint. And it’s just stuck with me ever since.”
She believes it’s the pairing of the fabric and the dye that enabled her to “create movement in a way that I probably couldn’t with just regular canvas and acrylic”.
“I have a technique in which I sprinkle the powder on top of the wet so it leaves these little sparks of colour on the velvet and everything kind of melts together in a really nice organic way.”
Ms Darrell is especially thrilled with the outcome as the technique is something she created all on her own.
“I’d been trying to replicate this dreamy, layered vision that I had and the closest thing I got to it was airbrushing, because you can layer light, airy colours over each other – I’ve seen people do that really well. I guess that might be the closest I’d ever seen to what I’d been trying to achieve.”
Release, Soleé Darrell, 2023, Dye on silk velvet, 2024 Bermuda Biennial
She was also asked to speak on her connections to Bermuda, after living in the United States for around 15 years:
“I do think that being Bermudian plays a huge role in what I do. I feel like because I’m Bermudian the colour and the brightness and the light are all just in me wherever I go. And I have done some paintings in Bermuda that turned out to be my best work.”
Although she has shown her work in smaller galleries in San Francisco, displaying it in a museum with the stature of the BNG is a first.
“I applied because I thought it might be really fun and a way for me to create a community in Bermuda, a way for people to see my work – specifically my family. I didn’t think I would get in so when I did, I was just so honoured.”