Ithell Colquhoun, Art, Magic, and the Living Landscape

Over the past decade there has been a resurgence of interest in art that embodies a spirituality rooted in Nature. Amy Hale’s Ithell Colquhoun: Genius of the Fern Loved Gully, beautifully produced by Strange Attractor Press, is a particularly interesting study of these themes and of an artist whose work has only relatively recently begun to receive the wider recognition it deserves.

This renewed attention belongs to a broader cultural longing for forms of meaning that are embodied, local and sensuous rather than entirely abstract or conceptual. Across art, spirituality and our changing relationship with the natural world, there appears to be a renewed receptivity towards ways of knowing that are relational and place-based.

Colquhoun feels particularly prescient within this landscape, although not because she somehow anticipated a contemporary trend. There were certainly aspects of the particular social and cultural mileu of the times that influenced the forms of art and spirituality encountered and engaged with, however to me Colquhoun comes across more as someone who simply never abandoned a worldview in which matter itself could be alive, ensouled and communicative. Her paintings, writings, magical practices and relationship with place arose from that same ground.

Nature, the numinous, and localised power

Living traditions in which the numinous is encountered through a particular tree, standing stone, spring or other localised concentration of power have once again become sources of inspiration rather than material consigned to dusty bookshelves.

Such places may certainly possess a distinctive atmosphere, but the claim within magical and esoteric traditions is often stronger than this. Particular localities can be understood as carrying or concentrating a current, something genuinely active rather than simply evocative to the human imagination.

Colquhoun herself wrote in Sangreal magazine in 1979 of places the ancients called “Fountains of Hecate”, describing chthonic power-centres whose energies could be encountered more strongly at particular times and seasons. Amy Hale notes that the related expression “Fountains of Hecate” was adopted by Kenneth Grant, while tracing the underlying idea through the reception of the Chaldean Oracles within Western esotericism.

What interests me here is the strength of the claim being made about place. Colquhoun is not merely describing somewhere with an interesting atmosphere, although her own instincts about the atmosphere of a place were clearly important to her. She is describing a locality possessing its own current and rhythms of power, something one might gradually learn to recognise by remaining close enough, and receptive enough, to its changes.

Her art emerges from precisely this kind of orientation. Her paintings, writings and magical practices developed through direct encounter with landscape, especially the ancient and myth-saturated terrain of Cornwall. Caves, wells, stones and coastal formations could be approached as places in which power gathered and through which deeper realities became perceptible.

Imagination in this sense becomes something receptive, one of the faculties through which the landscape might be encountered more fully, and known in a relational sense. Some of the most lucid writing about this that that I know of appears in Figured Stones: Exploring the Lithic Imaginary, by Paul Prudence.

By looking beyond the reductionism of 'just materiality', we can begin to understand something of the earth's desires as it communicates to us through the landscapes it has devised to speak its language.

That nature has devised a way to offer these signs and open these channels should be no surprise, for it has also fine-tuned the equipment required to perceive them.

Matter and body

There is also something profoundly earthly in Colquhoun’s spiritual vision. Earth and Nature are reclaimed from inherited associations with the demonic or fallen, and from a legacy of religious thought that often appeared unable to tolerate what it could not control.

The human body, perhaps particularly the female body, is no longer feared, rejected or reduced to ornament, but can become a microcosm of wider forces. Stones are described as living, as “animated intelligences”, while matter itself ceases to be the cold absence of conscious life that a strictly materialist worldview might have us imagine.

This orientation runs throughout Colquhoun’s fascination with alchemy, sexuality and bodily form. Her imagery can return eros to the erotic without requiring sensuality and spiritual life to occupy opposing territories. Body, sexuality, imagination and creativity may all become means through which more-than-human forces disclose themselves.

There is undoubtedly a political dimension to this, although I would hesitate to prise it apart from the magical one. Her resistance to the domination of women and Nature belongs to the same wider refusal of a world in which matter is passive and therefore available to be possessed, controlled or exploited.

The return of the hidden

None of these ways of thinking ever disappeared completely, of course, but there has undoubtedly been a particular cultural moment in which artists, mystics, magicians and witches previously veiled from a wider audience by prejudice or incomprehension have returned to view.

Colquhoun is one of the highest-profile recent examples. Major exhibitions at Tate St Ives and Tate Britain have placed work once situated considerably further towards the margins of British art history before a much larger audience.

Colquhoun’s seriousness about magic matters because it changes how the artwork itself needs to be understood. Occultism was not an atmosphere attached to her imagery after the fact, but belonged to the structure of her artistic and spiritual life.

This contemporary recovery of occult and esoteric culture does contain its own tension, however. Material once dismissed, hidden or treated with suspicion can become fashionable with remarkable speed, while commercial culture has an extraordinary capacity to absorb what was difficult or sacred and return it as style, commodity or identity. This lies behind the increasingly familiar, partly humorous suggestion within occult circles that perhaps it is time to make the occult occult again.

There is a serious question beneath the joke. Concealment, difficulty and initiation have often been understood as ways of protecting forms of knowledge from trivialisation, or even their misuse or destruction. Colquhoun is useful in this respect precisely because her magic was embedded within art practice and a way of life, and therefor cannot be reduced to aesthetic branding. It can be both fully visible, and yet hidden in plain sight. The mark of a true magician.

Art at the Crossroads

I think of Colquhoun as existing at a crossroads between fine art, magic and social reform.

I prefer crossroads to intersection. Intersection only conjures an image of bland asphalt, road markings and traffic management, whereas the crossroads is a place of encounter with strange forces, the opposer, the unexpected traveller, where earth gets under your fingernails rather like materials in a studio.

It is an old mythic location. Crossroads belong to Hecate, tricksters, encounters between worlds and moments when apparently separate paths meet without necessarily becoming the same path.

Colquhoun inhabited something of this position practically as well as symbolically. She moved between painting and writing, Surrealism and ceremonial magic, solitary spiritual practice and wider questions about social and sexual freedom. The artist becomes someone who walks between worlds, although perhaps the deeper implication is that those worlds were never as separate as we imagined.

Surrealism and magical method

Colquhoun’s relationship with Surrealism becomes particularly interesting when we consider her use of automatism. Automatic methods did not need to be understood simply as techniques for releasing personal fantasy or unconscious desire; they could become forms of attunement through which the conscious artist became receptive to something beyond deliberate intention.

Drawing, painting and writing could therefore approach divination, scrying or other magical methods. An image was not necessarily something the artist simply decided to produce and subsequently interpreted. The process itself could become an encounter.

This places Colquhoun’s practice in interesting proximity to depth psychological understandings of image, particularly where an image is allowed a degree of autonomy rather than immediately being translated into what the conscious personality already thinks it means.

Her interest in alchemy deepens this further. Transformation is material as well as spiritual, and occurs through participation in a process whose outcome cannot simply be commanded in advance. There is patience in this, but also receptivity: an ability to remain with materials and images long enough for something unforeseen to emerge.

Cornwall and the living landscape

Cornwall was not simply Colquhoun’s place of residence. It became a spiritual geography through which her artistic and magical life was oriented.

Its megaliths, wells, caves, rock formations and coast belonged to a landscape in which physical geography, mythology and spiritual experience continually entered one another. She approached particular sites with a combination of research, imaginative receptivity and devotional seriousness.

This is one of the aspects of Colquhoun that resonates most strongly with my own preoccupation with landscape. A place can simultaneously possess geology, ecology and history while gathering memory, myth and spiritual significance. None of these dimensions necessarily invalidates the others. Indeed, the peculiar richness of a place may depend upon their coexistence.

This is why the language of the Fountains out of Hecate is so revealing. The magical understanding of locality involved here is stronger than simply finding a landscape beautiful or projecting mythic associations onto it. A place may possess its own qualities and currents, while the human task involves becoming sufficiently attentive to recognise and enter into relationship with them.

That strikes me as rather different from some contemporary language of re-enchantment. One way in which I notice this term being employed is the suggestion that the world (rather than the human) has somehow become disenchanted and requires human beings to supply the missing magic. There can be a subtle grandiosity in imagining ourselves as the re-enchanters of an otherwise diminished world.

Colquhoun suggests something closer to receptivity. The landscape does not need to be made magical. Its vitality was not waiting for us to invent it. What may need cultivating is our capacity to perceive, receive and respond to what is already there. This is where an attitude of reverence becomes important.

Colquhoun in the present

The contemporary return to Colquhoun is partly a correction of art-historical neglect, but that alone does not explain the intensity of the renewed interest around her. In some respects it is only now that she has been permitted to matter publicly on something closer to her own terms.

What appears newly legible is the seriousness with which she refused familiar divisions between art and spiritual life, psyche and landscape, body and sacred experience.

There is something significant in encountering an artist for whom stones could be animated intelligences and particular places concentrations of chthonic power, while these ideas were neither allegorical embellishments nor eccentric hobbies sitting beside the “real” artwork.

For contemporary viewers this can be challenging because we are accustomed to deciding whether such statements are literally true or psychologically symbolic, and then positioning ourselves accordingly. Colquhoun’s world is less obliging. Magical, psychological, material and imaginative realities continually overlap, which is a genuinely alchemical worldview.

Perhaps this is part of the reason her work has acquired such energy in the present. She represents a way of making art in which spiritual reality does not have to be apologetically translated into metaphor before it can enter the gallery.

Art, magic and attention

Colquhoun offers an important reminder that imagination need not be an escape from reality. It can be one of our means of entering more deeply into relationship with it.

Her work invites attention to images, bodies, materials and localities without requiring them to be immediately reduced to explanation. That orientation has obvious resonances with depth psychology, but it belongs equally strongly to artistic practice.

To remain with an image long enough for it to become more than an illustration of an idea requires receptivity. So does entering into relationship with a landscape without immediately turning it into scenery, resource or personal metaphor.

This is close to how I increasingly understand my own work through landscape, relation and reverence. Art, magic and landscape do not feel like separate interests arranged conveniently around one another. They arise together from a deeper question about how we perceive and participate in a world that possesses its own presence and continually exceeds us.

Colquhoun remains compelling because she lived that question with unusual seriousness, and because her work asks us to consider the possibility that the world may be stranger, more vital and more communicative than the categories through which we have learned to contain it.