Over the past month, I have been reflecting on Antonia’s new exhibition, having first seen it at the Brighton Fringe. I met Antonia Rolls in 2023 at the Edinburgh Fringe, where she exhibited Addicts and Those Who Love Them, the year her elder son died of addiction. I was fortunate to become friends with her. During the following two years, her younger son died by suicide and from addiction. It takes time to process death—death in the form of art, death not merely observed in an exhibition but connected to someone I care for. Around the time of Antonia’s younger son’s death, my first AA sponsee died of food poisoning; someone I dated many years ago took their own life while under the influence; and a new friend died from an addiction I had been unaware of.
As a society, we are afraid of death. I grew up in a village where keeping an open coffin in the house for three days was tradition, and it was thought beneficial to have children nearby, as we somehow facilitated the soul’s departure to better places. My favourite childhood food was pancakes with honey, served at Russian funeral dinners. They served them—with vodka—when my father died from addiction, when I was in my twenties. His body was not kept at home, as the tradition was starting to die out. We had grown too afraid of death and too practical to keep it so close. Deaths from addiction are particularly uncomfortable to witness: addiction is viewed as dirty, and such deaths are often messy.
Antonia has sufficient strength and love for her lost sons, and also for other addicts who died, to see through this messiness—to perceive the light, the magic, the multidimensionality of life and death. You can look at it. And for many of us, it is essential to look, not to bury it within our psyche as the body is buried in the ground. We are alive, and we need to stay with this truth to remain alive.
I have been sober for over fifteen years now. I am sober enough not to judge who succeeds and who does not. I am certainly not superior to anyone else, in addiction or in recovery. The thirst for wholeness—addiction, as Christina Grof termed it (her book led me to AA)—is something we all share. We attempt to achieve it through alcohol and drugs, but for us addicts they have the opposite effect: we seem to drift further from feeling whole with ourselves, with others and with the universe. Some of us manage to approach wholeness in recovery; others only attain it in death.
Antonia’s exhibition suggests that lonely addicts dying from addiction are never truly alone. They are watched over by the Beloveds—other people who died perhaps sad and lonely deaths. These Beloveds collect the souls of the deceased addicts and guide them into the light. Antonia’s perspective on the afterlife reminded me of the Kazakh nomads’ belief that ancestors look after the living. My Kazakh friends told me that even if someone dies by suicide, it signifies that the ancestors have called them to watch over those still alive.
The warmth and beauty of Antonia’s paintings make the fourth dimension visible. Here they are—Antonia and her daughter Lexi—and here they are, Costya and Dmitri, painted as a holy family in a style reminiscent of Russian icons. Costya and Dmitri were half Russian; addiction does not discriminate, but I can sense the weight of Russian toska* they bore throughout their lives – and in death. Antonia’s and Lexi’s love and care for them have been sacred.
We agnostics: if the concept of an afterlife is not something you share, you may still find the very fact of such an exhibition enlightening. I have focused on Antonia’s story, but she did not. All her exhibitions are profoundly communal. People come and shed light on their own beloveds for Antonia to bring into view. See them, remember those you have lost, and make them alive through your memories. Their lives had meaning and purpose, and so did their deaths. The suffering addicts are all around us, and perhaps we can help some of them to become whole while still living.
Beloved will run from 2nd – 13th August 2025 at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Whitespace Gallery, 76 East Crosscauseway.
Opening night is Monday 2nd August
Entrance is free
For more on Antonia Rolls’s work visit https://antoniarolls.co.uk/
“Toska” (тоска) is a Russian word often described as having no direct English equivalent. It generally encompasses feelings of profound sadness, melancholic longing or spiritual anguish, often accompanied by a sense of unease or emptiness. It is more than mere sadness; it can involve a deep, aching sense of loss, a yearning for something undefined, or a pervasive feeling of disconnection.
