ST IVES, ENGLAND — For Ithell Colquhoun, the world was alive. Energies, legendary forces, and photo voltaic alignments imbued landscapes with powers that wove collectively human beings, ecologies, and the cosmos, and people energies ran near the floor in West Cornwall. It was right here, subsequently, that she selected to settle in her later years, with a small studio just a few miles from the place Tate St Ives now stands. After her dying, her archive was unfold between the Tate and the Nationwide Belief, and her popularity dwindled. In recent times, nonetheless, her papers have been reunited and examined for the primary time, ensuing within the largest ever exhibition of Colquhoun’s unusual and experimental work.
The featured art work of this exhibition is the portray “Scylla (méditerranée)” (1938), through which a pair of fleshy rock formations emerge from clear water, with a clump of hair-like seaweed nestled within the cleft at their bases. The wall textual content quotes Colquhoun, who acknowledged that the work “was suggested by what I could see of myself in a bath.” With this rationalization, the picture resolves into readability after which again into uncertainty. The work is replete with associations: Eroded cliffs are feminine legs, however additionally they resemble a pair of phalluses. A pointy-ended boat sails in direction of the vaginal opening between them, concurrently clean and violent. For Colquhoun, the work was a Surrealist-inspired “double-image in the Daliesque sense,” through which the viewer sees a number of issues without delay.
Ithell Colquhoun, “Scylla (méditerranée)” (1938) (© Spire Healthcare, © Noise Abatement Society, © Samaritans)
The panorama in “Scylla (méditerranée)” is alive in a method that speaks to Colquhoun’s beliefs as an occultist, embracing and reviving historic philosophical practices surrounding animism, mysticism, alchemy, and ritual. Right here, as elsewhere, she mixed these concepts along with her curiosity in Surrealism and related methods equivalent to computerized drawing and decalcomania, which includes making use of blobs of paint and urgent them down with paper, earlier than “reading” the ensuing textures and patterns as if divining tea leaves.
For the primary time, a few of Colquhoun’s decalcomania work are offered alongside the counterpart pages she used to press the paint down, offering an intriguing perception into her course of. In “Attributes of the Moon” (1947), Colquhoun coaxes the textural types right into a goddess determine enclosed in a womb-like pink cave, treading upon a tangle of vegetal roots and an upturned crescent moon. It speaks to a spirituality that transcends any particular tradition, as an alternative drawing on a perennial understanding of the sacred that was standard amongst Colquhoun’s contemporaries, equivalent to Max Ernst and Leonora Carrington.
Ithell Colquhoun, “Attributes of the Moon” (1947) (© Tate; picture by Matt Greenwood)
The vary of Colquhoun’s non secular pursuits is confirmed in a show of non-public sketches exploring every thing from theoretical spatial diagrams depicting additional dimensions and the Kabbalistic tree of life, to chakras and the conjunction of masculine and female energies. One notably attention-grabbing tiny sketch exhibits the intertwined our bodies of two feminine lovers, one in blue and one in purple ink, suggesting the union of gendered energies even in gay encounters.
The exhibition reaches its pinnacle in a room devoted to Colquhoun’s work of historic stone formations, together with a number of within the close by Cornish countryside. “The Sunset Birth” (c. 1942) is a unprecedented depiction of a neighborhood stone pierced with a gap, by way of which individuals would climb in a fertility ceremony. In Colquhoun’s portray, the stones seem to glow from inside, encircled by colourful power traces rooted within the depths of the translucent earth. It’s a unusual however compellingly assured picture, stuffed with a magic that Colquhoun felt deeply herself. It’s to the credit score of this beneficiant and expansive exhibition that it gives house for Colquhoun’s works to sing in all their strangeness — and all their unidentifiable energy.
Ithell Colquhoun, “Dance of the Nine Opals” (1942) (© Spire Healthcare, © Noise Abatement Society, © Samaritans)
Ithell Colquhoun, “Gorgon” (1946) (© Spire Healthcare, © Noise Abatement Society, © Samaritans)
Ithell Colquhoun, “Water-Flower” (1938) (© Spire Healthcare, © Noise Abatement Society, © Samaritans)
Ithell Colquhoun: Between Worlds continues at Tate St Ives (Porthmeor Seaside, Saint Ives, United Kingdom) by way of Might 5, earlier than touring to Tate Britain, London, from June by way of October. The exhibition was curated by Katy Norris with Emma Sharples in session with Amy Hale, Alyce Mahon, and Richard Shillitoe.
