Offerings by Soleé Darrell at the Bermuda National Gallery presents a deeply personal body of work by the California-based artist. The paintings installed in the Hereward T. Watlington Gallery examine her Bermudian roots, intuitively drawing on memory and ancestry to transform the landscape into new pictorial spaces.

Rather than canvas, Ms Darrell paints on silk velvet to create a surprising textural, dimensional effect that pulses with profound colour.

On entering the gallery, the difference between traditional canvas and Ms Darrell’s velvet surface is immediately apparent.

Her painted surfaces richly embody the reverence she pays to her lineage, which, she maintains, runs through everything she makes.

Although Ms Darrell has lived in the US since her early childhood, she spent part of every year on the island with her family, and as a result, her Bermuda roots run deep.

Largely self-taught, she developed her practice through two key opportunities.

The first was a residency she undertook in 2023 to work, without specification, in Tokyo, where she began exploring the spiritual and meditative themes through mandala forms.

The following year, Ms Darrell was selected by the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) for their Emerging Artists Programme, where she continued evolving the experimental techniques now on view in Bermuda.

At both residencies, Ms Darrell concentrated on process, which continues to guide her approach.

Inspired by the mid-century American Abstract Expressionists, particularly the fluid, landscape references of Helen Frankenthaler, she yields to intuition, surrendering authorship to channel the spiritual echoes of her ancestors.

By listening to the rhythms of her past, she connects with the spiritual celebration of life and death and translates them into pictorial form.

Ms Darrell captures such a ritual and spiritual celebration in her painting Mind of Divinity (2024). This painting, like all her others, was painted outdoors while immersed in the natural environment.

Her communion with the landscape emerges through her resonant shapes and colours. Particularly in this work, the aura of Bermuda is clear.

The ocean’s indescribable cerulean and turquoise blues flow around the painting’s edges, encircling vivid reds and yellows.

Without literally recreating the Bermudian landscape, Ms Darrell has captured its visual essence.

Again, the singularity of the effect comes from her process.

She begins by dampening unstretched sheets of velvet. Then, rather than using a brush and medium, she pours pure powdered pigment onto the wet surface and lets it do its own thing. She doesn’t control the medium, but merely guides it with her bare hands.

“The pigment does what it does,” she explains. The effects, therefore, are entirely organic, growing and flowing as do the forces of nature.

In her Cry, Cry, Cry (2024), she stepped back even further. In this work, she experimented with a process called ice dyeing.

In some areas of the dampened velvet, she placed mounds of ice cubes. Over these, she sprinkled the powdered pigment.

As the ice melted, it mixed with the powder to form a distinctive pattern. Ms Darrell describes these as “honeycomb” patterns, and certainly the effect is utterly natural and organic, like the cellular structures of pods, petals, or leaves.

Sometimes, the pigment yields an entirely different pattern. In almost every example of her work on view, there is a mottling, a speckled area that results from small areas of undiluted pigment scattered on the surface.

This random patterning emphasises the degree to which she is willing to surrender to the technique rather than seek control over it.

Such freedom is also demonstrated by her unrestrained palette, the looseness of her shapes, and the biomorphic presence of the compositions, which engender new landscapes surfacing from a spiritual history.

Not unlike the mystical abstraction of Hilma af Klint, who was featured at the Museum of Modern Art in 2025 and whom Ms Darrell counts as an influence, she plumbs the depths of her connection to her family and the island to imagine new environments. Her intention, she says, is to “envelop people in space”.

For this reason, there is something familiar about these works on a visceral level.

Rather than recreate the bays and outlooks of Bermuda’s shores or its foliated trails and pathways as a traditional landscape artist would, Ms Darrell connects to Bermuda on a deeper and more fundamental level.

In the Bermuda exhibition, Ms Darrell includes a site-specific work more directly connected to Bermuda, dedicated to her Bermudian grandmothers. Her interest here was in “embodying an intentional space”. cultivating a set of particular memories.

Only the second such work she’s created, her Bermuda Portal (2026), took form only after her recent arrival on the island.

Although constructed from the same painted velvet surfaces, the installation breaks free from the stretcher frame to expand into the surrounding space.

Lanyards of “boondoggle” craftwork join beaded mandalas, hanging along blue nylon boat rope, their colours drawn from her memories of the island.

Integrated crocheted elements recall time spent with her grandmothers, learning alongside them.

By acknowledging their role in her creative process, she is ever mindful of women’s creative practices and how they are more often dismissed as “craftwork” rather than celebrated as artistry.

The Bermuda exhibition allows Ms Darrell to give voice to these past influences, bringing attention to the often overlooked artistic endeavours of female artists.

Furthermore, her attention to the spiritual, the organic, and the traditional offers insight into her creative heritage and the enduring influence of family and place within Bermuda’s artistic landscape.

Offerings by Soleé Darrell is at the Bermuda National Gallery through October 2026