Radical,
esoteric, and defiantly independent, Ithell Colquhoun (1906–1988)
remains one of the most enigmatic figures in British surrealism. A
painter, poet, and occultist, her practice dissolved the boundaries
between gender, sexuality, and spiritual inquiry, positioning her as
a visionary far ahead of her time. Having debuted at Tate St Ives in
February 2025, Ithell
Colquhoun: Between Worlds
comes to Tate Britain from June and promises to be the largest
exhibition of her work ever staged, featuring over 170 works,
including rare archival material and pieces never before displayed
publicly.
Below,
in the lead-up to this major exhibition coming to Tate Britain, we
delve into the life and work of Colquhoun to explore some of the
facets of her legacy that make her such an intriguing figure.
Rewriting
the myth: Queer Feminism in Colquhoun’s Surrealism
In
1927, Colquhoun enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art, where she
developed her distinctive approach to symbolism and composition. She
was awarded joint first prize in the Summer Composition Competition
for “Judith Showing the Head of Holofernes”, an early highlight
in the exhibition’s curatorial journey. Reimagining the biblical
tale of Judith – the widow who seduces and beheads the Assyrian
general Holofernes to protect her people – Colquhoun renders
feminist vengeance through a surrealist lens.
Dreamlike
fragmentation liberates Judith from the constraints of passive
femininity, transforming her into an archetype of mystical, embodied
power. As in many of Colquhoun’s early works, the female figures
are imbued with a striking masculinity – more muscular and heroic
than their male counterparts, their bold, fleshy limbs and austere
stances confronting the viewer with authority rather than
subservience. Her reworkings of myth often centre the sacred
androgynous body, eroticism between women, and archetypes that resist
binary structures – offering an ecstatic, visionary model of queer
embodiment that feels startlingly contemporary.
Esoteric
Foundations : Occult Influences and the Surrealist Rift
From
an early age, Colquhoun was drawn to the esoteric. In 1928, she
joined the Quest Society, founded by George Robert Stow Mead, former
secretary to Helena Blavatsky of the Theosophical Society. The
Society aimed to synthesise religion, philosophy, and science through
esoteric traditions, and it laid the foundations for Colquhoun’s
lifelong spiritual inquiries.
She
later affiliated herself with other occultist groups such as the
Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO),
drawing deeply from ceremonial magic, alchemy, and mystical
symbolism. During her time at the Académie Colarossi in Paris, she
was also exposed to the work of Salvador Dalí and other surrealists,
expanding her interest in automatism and psychoanalytic theories of
the unconscious. Colquhoun frequently corresponded with surrealist
André Breton and remained deeply engaged with surrealist thought,
even as her own practice increasingly veered toward mystical and
feminist territory beyond the movement’s patriarchal centre.
Though
aligned with British surrealism until 1940, Colquhoun eventually
broke away from the movement, finding its increasingly orthodox
politics incompatible with her pluralistic worldview. Her
estrangement marked a decisive shift away from British modernism and
toward a mystical, deeply personal exploration of inner and outer
landscapes. “Symbolic scenes of ‘mind pictures’ may be dredged
up from the depths of fantasy life,” she wrote, viewing her
artistic practice not only as a creative technique but as a mode of
divination – capable of accessing realms beyond temporal or bodily
experience.
Mysticism
of the Land: Cornwall and the Sacred Feminine
In
1958, amid a growing sense of estrangement from the artistic
mainstream, Ithell Colquhoun relocated to the remote village of Paul
in West Penwith, Cornwall – a landscape she had long regarded as
sacred. Steeped in myth and mysticism, the region’s ancient wells,
megalithic stones, druidic relics, and carved crosses became more
than just motifs in her work; they formed the living architecture of
her spiritual imagination. Here, she devoted herself to painting,
writing, and esoteric study, weaving together Celtic history, poetic
vision, and occult philosophy. For Colquhoun, the Cornish landscape
functioned as both psychic terrain and spiritual archive – a
liminal space where her artistic, mystical, and intellectual pursuits
could converge.
For
Colquhoun, myth was not merely inherited – it was alive,
continually generated by the unconscious in dialogue with land and
archetype. She often invoked sacred geography in her art. Works such
as Dance
of the Nine Maidens
(1940) and Dance
of the Nine Opals
(1942) depict local rock formations as sentient, mythic figures. The
Cornish stones are anthropomorphised, dancing, dreaming, almost
breathing – inviting the viewer into a dreamtime where history,
magic, and geology converge. Her sketch of Dance
of the Nine Opals
reveals a meticulous sensitivity to the energetic webs that pulse
beneath the surface – currents invisible to the untrained eye yet
charged with historical, folkloric, and mystical significance.
The
Alchemical Body : Eroticism, Energy an the Feminine
Throughout
her career, Colquhoun sought to map the hidden correspondences
between plants, planets, body parts, and sacred geometry. Her work is
charged with symbolic energy – merging anatomical forms with
botanical structures, sexual imagery with cosmic diagrams.
In
“Attributes of the Moon” (1947) Colquhoun conjures the landscape
not as passive but as generative, and feminine, expressing a vision
of the feminine as protean and plural – a living system of symbols
in continual metamorphosis. In “The Anatomy” (1942), a yonic work
that evokes the enfolding architecture of caves, Colquhoun draws on
the elemental symbolism of the earth as womb – simultaneously a
site of concealment, transformation, and power. The image recalls the
myth of Daphne, metamorphosed into a laurel tree by her father, a
river god, to escape the sexual pursuit of Apollo. “The Anatomy”
not only asserts the generative force of the feminine, but also
reframes retreat and metamorphosis as acts of self-preservation and
agency.
Archives
of Magic : Colquhoun’s Library of the Occult
A
pivotal starting point for the 2025 exhibition was Tate’s
acquisition of Colquhoun’s personal archive from the National Trust
in 2019. Comprising over 5,000 items, including sketches, writings,
and unpublished diagrams, the collection reveals the extent of her
devotion to the mystical arts.
Her
personal library – now housed in the Tate Archives – includes
over 300 volumes on Greek mythology, alchemy, surrealism, Kabbalah,
and ceremonial magic. Among them are The
Golden Dawn
(1937), The
Kabbalah Unveiled
(1887), Liber
777
by Aleister Crowley (1909), Dreams
and Dream Stories
by Anna Kingsford (1888), and Witchcraft
Today
by Gerald Gardner (1954). Together, they trace a lineage of esoteric
thought through which Colquhoun developed her own queer, visionary
cosmology.
A
Radical Legacy
Colquhoun’s
work dissolves conventional frameworks of gender, art, science, and
spirit. She crafted a language in which imagination was not fantasy
but a form of knowledge; where women could be both warriors and
mystics; where eroticism was a divine force; and where the land
itself was alive with memory and myth.
In
our current cultural moment – one increasingly attuned to questions
of fluid identity, ecological consciousness, and spiritual resurgence
– Colquhoun’s legacy feels not only relevant but radical.
Ithell
Colquhoun: A queer, occultist artist who created between worlds. By
Isabella Greenwood. Dazed, May 27, 2025.
Tate
Excellent
long read.
Ithell
Colquhoun: Mantic Stains, Sex & Surrealism by
Andy Wilson.
The Traveller in the Evening, March 7, 2025.
On
a hillside not far from Land’s End, at the boundary of four
parishes, stands the Mên Scryfa: perhaps Britain’s most resilient
standing stone.
It
is a slab of granite about six feet tall, likely first erected in the
Bronze Age, and now set in the middle of a field (where it has served
as a scratching post for itchy cows). Draw closer and you see a faint
Latin inscription on its surface: “Rialobranus, son of Cunovalus”.
The writing is a later addition from the 5th-6th century AD: two
figures unknown, likely of noble blood. Run your fingers across the
wonky lettering — feel the grooves in the granite, rough-textured
as an oyster shell — and you almost sense an uncertainty in the
scribe, recording the names in this novel Roman script.
By
the 18th century Mên Scryfa had fallen down. It was re-erected in
1825, toppled again by treasure hunters in 1862 and put right again
soon after. In June 2023, vandals set the stone ablaze with petrol
and dug a ditch in a bid to topple it a third time (without success).
On my visit last month, the lichen lost to the fire had started to
return. The scorch marks were gone.
The
Cornish hedgerows were thin on my visit to Mên Scryfa, the winter
air sharp and clear, and so there were sightlines to other
prehistoric monuments nearby: ancient barrows, quoits — and
megaliths on the horizon that you had to fix your gaze upon a while
to be sure they were not figures watching the Atlantic sunset, but
cold sightless stones present there for thousands of years.
Here
you understand a truth likely evident to Rialobranus, Cunovalus or
their scribe. That Cornish granite is a stubborn material: hard to
displace and prone to remembering the names of those etched into its
grain after they have passed. Perhaps father and son expected a
record of their dynasty would perish in parchment, but might endure
for eternity if carved into a Bronze Age standing stone.
Penwith
(meaning “the headland at the end”) marks the southwestern tip of
the British mainland: a hook-shaped peninsula buttressed against the
Atlantic by its steep granite cliffs. It counts as one of Europe’s
densest prehistoric landscapes: filled with relics from the
Neolithic, Bronze Age and Iron Age past. In antiquity this area was a
centre for mining: gold and tin were exported through prehistoric
seaways. Cornish tin is found in the Nebra sky disc: an Early Bronze
Age artefact, discovered in Germany in 1999, that is perhaps
humanity’s oldest depiction of the night sky.
For
much of winter the peninsula is besieged by gales. For much of summer
it is braced against a headwind of mass tourism from the opposite
direction. Crowds rush down the A30 to visit the tourist attraction
at Land’s End: to watch 4D films, enjoy the Wallace and Gromit
experience and take a selfie with the famous sign. For charity
cyclists, Penwith flashes by in a flood of endorphins as they begin
the long ride north to John O’Groats in Scotland.
I
had visited on a beach holiday in August, but exploring its
prehistoric sites in midwinter I was in another country. Holiday
cottages were untenanted and unlit. Little drifts of storm-blown sand
lay unshovelled by front doors. In one, a model boat placed in the
window had cobwebs for rigging.
The
roads were silent too. Rather than hunting for expensive beachfront
parking, my quarry was potholed lay-bys on country lanes. Rather than
scrumming through bank holiday crowds, I knocked on farmhouse doors,
looking for someone, anyone to direct me to an obscure megalith I had
spied on an OS map. Mostly I was alone with the stones — without
company but for starling murmurations roused from the hedgerows when
a five-bar gate clanged shut behind me.
There
was another reason I was here. Tate St Ives has just opened the first
major exhibition of Ithell Colquhoun — a painter and writer, much
of whose creative output was inspired by Penwith’s ancient
landscapes. Born in the hills of Assam in 1906, Colquhoun was a
colourful figure. She had studied at the Slade, saw Dali lecture in
London and was photographed by Man Ray holding a sheaf of wheat in
Paris. She was ostracised by other figures in British surrealism
because of her involvement in the occult, but hers was the life of a
spiritual seeker.
Countless
artists had come to St Ives for its famous light: many sought
pastoral visions in Penwith’s fishing villages. Colquhoun came here
to paint something beyond the visible: currents of mysterious energy
she perceived flowing between ancient sites, cryptic stone circles
whose meaning she sought to decode. In her 1957 book The Living
Stones, she wrote of “stones that whisper, stones that dance, that
play on pipe or fiddle, that tremble at cockcrow, that eat and drink,
stones that march as an army — these unhewn slabs of granite hold
the secret of the country’s inner life.” This new exhibition was
seen by some as being a risky move for Tate: even 36 years after her
death there was concern her art might seem too “woo-woo” for
Anglo-Saxon sensibilities. But then, strike out beyond the gallery,
drive west down the narrowing lanes of Penwith, and you soon remember
this is no Anglo-Saxon land.
To
cross the River Tamar into Cornwall is to cross a boundary whose
subtleties maps don’t represent. In the minds of Penwith locals, a
second threshold — the River Hayle — separates their own
peninsula from the rest of the county. Penwith was reputedly home to
the last native speakers of the Cornish language, and is where
Cornwall’s granite backbone breaks out from beneath sedimentary
rocks to reach the surface. Here — like Iona, Bardsey, Finistère —
there is the sense that Celtic blood runs thickest where the last
land succumbs to the sea.
Ithell
Colquhoun understood this distinction when she came here in the
1940s. Boarding a Penzance-bound train at Paddington, she was
escaping a bombed-out capital, a failed marriage and an unfulfilled
love with a woman she had met in a hotel in Mykonos. In Penwith she
immediately sensed a change: a “tingling magnetism” and “a
balsamic quality of the air that never fails to bring healing”. She
had found her cure.
She
rented a corrugated iron studio in Lamorna, on Penwith’s southern
coast. Where much of the peninsula is moorland dotted with hawthorn
and blackthorn, the valley at Lamorna is jungly and — even on my
winter visit — faintly tropical. There were bamboo groves and palm
fronds rustling in the breeze. Colquhoun wrote of the Penzance dragon
trees and other exotic species sustained by the Gulf Stream. Her
studio had neither electricity nor a loo but she set to work:
painting to the morning song of turtle doves in the valley. Lying in
bed after dark, she felt the wings of bats from the attic touching
her forehead. To her mind the peninsula was an enchanted land: both
Atlantis and Avalon, its “Druidic” temples and Celtic saints
manifestations of a deeper power in the granite bedrock. Where others
considered it peripheral or at the end of the world, Colquhoun
envisaged it a sacred centre of the planet.
Today
her former studio — Vow Cave — is a private holiday home.
Skylights have been fitted where the bats roosted. The retreat evoked
in The Living Stones seems distant, but the prehistoric sites she
painted nearby are unchanged. One afternoon I set out to explore some
of them in the company of Matthew Shaw and Lally MacBeth, a couple
who are the founders of Stone Club, a Cornwall-based organisation
celebrating prehistoric landmarks. They first bonded over a shared
love of Colquhoun’s work.
We
stopped at the Merry Maidens: a late Neolithic to early Bronze Age
stone circle that Colquhoun portrayed in Dance of the Nine Opals
(1942). We drove down the single-track lane depicted in “Landscape
with Antiquities (Lamorna)” (1950). We stopped for lunch at The
Kings Arms in Paul — the village where Colquhoun later lived,
before passing away in a nearby nursing home in 1988. A group of
pagans were sitting at the next table, whispering plans for an
evening ritual at a nearby site. “So we do three clockwise
perambulations . . . ”
Ritual
practices also continue at Penwith’s strangest prehistoric
landmark: Mên-an-Tol. The centrepiece of this roughly 3,000-year-old
site is a stone with a hole, depicted in Colquhoun’s painting
“Sunset Birth” (1942). Folklore tells that women who crawl
through it naked will be healed of infertility — early drafts of
Sunset Birth show a feminine figure levitating in the circle. “You
occasionally see half-dressed people hiding in the bushes,” Lally
told me. “Some Cornish women even talk about having their own
‘Mên-an-Tol baby’.”
Ancient
sites like Mên-an-Tol were launch pads for Colquhoun’s
imagination: prompts for deep time dreams. Her paintings are
testament to how objects of such unfathomable antiquity invite a
perspective that transcends ordinary sight. But exploring the St Ives
exhibition, you sense there is also something unspoken. At the time
Colquhoun was working, ley lines and earth energies were a novel idea
— they are now universally regarded as pseudoscience. Her
interpretation of stone circles as abodes of the divine feminine was
once a fashionable one — it is also without evidence.
The
function and meaning of those prehistoric sites she painted is
uncertain, dating as it does to an unrecorded past. The esoteric,
tantric and classical allusions in her art and writing are visionary,
but they are also only projections. In one sense Colquhoun was
radical. In another, she belonged to a long-established tradition: an
outsider in Cornwall, in love with a half-imaginary land.
In
the 1980s, encampments of new age travellers were often pitched up by
the stone circles of Penwith. Now they are gone but at the centre of
the peninsula I tracked down Palden Jenkins, a self-described “aged
hippy”. He had lived in Glastonbury and been an activist in
Palestine before moving in his sixties to take up residence in a
caravan near the Penwith village of Sancreed, with its granite
15th-century church and even older holy well, where pilgrims still
come to tie cloth offerings to the trees.
Jenkins
runs Ancient Penwith (ancientpenwith.org), a project to map what he
described as a “landscape temple”, the network of ancient sites
relaying energy in the manner of a “circuit board”. He
instinctively understood Colquhoun’s paintings: he too felt the
difference when he stepped on to the granite west of Penzance. Palden
had been given a terminal bone marrow cancer diagnosis in 2019. He
had been a champion fell runner in his youth: now it entailed a
similar effort to walk to the Bronze Age barrows on nearby farmland,
to have a smoke, reflect and heal.
“Strictly
speaking I shouldn’t be alive now,” he told me. “I can’t put
that down solely to visiting ancient sites. But they do have an
effect on me: like an energy bath. Healing doesn’t always mean
getting better, but helping you deal with the situation you have. You
have to make peace with your death.”
A
stone jetty extends out into a Cornish cove at dusk Lamorna Cove at
dusk I drove a final lap around the peninsula. I passed the Mên
Scryfa, guarding the boundary of four parishes, and the green valley
at Lamorna, of which Colquhoun had written: “here, to exist here
was enough.” Lastly, a couple of miles inland from Sennen Cove, I
climbed Chapel Carn Brea, Penwith’s most southwesterly hill and
itself supposedly a point of convergence for energy lines.
It
was a bright, blustery morning. The Isles of Scilly were visible
across a shining sea. Even a sceptic could discern energy flows from
the summit. Above were the crooked vapour trails of planes changing
course as they entered UK airspace. Below, undersea cables relayed
power and information across the ocean, out of sight. But most
perceptible was the Gulf Stream wind, making landfall after crossing
endless leagues of open ocean. And the action of the waves all along
that granite peninsula — crashing on the first and last rocks of
England. Which, of course, were not quite England at all.
Cornwall’s
mystical far west — in the footsteps of Ithell Colquhoun.
By Oliver Smith. Financial Times, February 12, 2025.
Lamorna
is a small village on the Cornish coast, in the far southwest of
Britain. The expansive skies and landscapes of the area have long
been a draw for artists, most famously painters associated with the
Newlyn school such as Laura Knight, Alfred Munnings and Lamorna
Birch. Less well known are the ground-breaking queer artists who set
down roots in the village: Marlow Moss, Gluck and Ithell Colquhoun.
In this film, we tell their story, and the story of the Cornwall
where they lived and loved: a place of international modernism,
Celtic spiritualism and the queer avant-garde.
Queer
Cornwall: Marlow Moss, Gluck and Ithell Colquhoun in Lamorna. Tate,
October 29, 2021.
Ithell
Colquhoun’s reputation as a Surrealist artist, writer and occultist
has been surging in recent years. Most know her through her quirky
travelogues of Ireland and Cornwall Crying
of the Wind: Ireland(1955)
and The
Living Stones: Cornwall (1957),
her Surrealist occult novel Goose
of Hermogenes (1961), or
perhaps her idiosyncratic account of the history of the Golden Dawn,
The
Sword of Wisdom (1975). Her
visual art has been less accessible until recently, but is becoming
more widely known with recent, beautifully illustrated publications
featuring her Taro (tarot) deck and her color study of the Sephiroth
of the Tree of Life, The
Decad of Intelligence.
Her genius is evident, yet so much about this brilliant and eccentric
figure remains elusive. As I eagerly await the publication of my own
biography of Colquhoun, Genius
of the Fern Loved Gully
(coming soon from Strange
Attractor Preess),
I thought I might delight you all with a topic I don’t address in
the book in any great depth: Colquhoun seemed to have a weird thing
about exploring base bodily functions with some delight. We don’t
see this in just a few isolated literary incidents, urination and
defecation are deliberate themes, explored sometimes with a strange
intimate aside, and sometimes in rather perplexing detail.
Now,
it should be noted that Colquhoun wasn’t ever one to shy away from
bold and socially prohibited imagery, particularly when it came to
sex and bodies. In the 1930s and early 1940s her paintings went from
somewhat suggestive studies of plants to vulvic tree trunks and
full-frontal male nudes. Her private erotic studies also spared no
detail. In her writings, Colquhoun’s treatment of bodily functions
was not limited to urination and defecation. Her vignettes and prose
poems referred to excreta on a number of occasions, however
elimination appears in rather distinctive contexts. In various short
pieces, Colquhoun writes of menstruation, skin conditions, scabs,
open sores, and some weird brown fluid that seeped out of her navel
at some stage which fascinated her. It is clear that she wishes to
confront her audience with images that are in many ways completely
ordinary yet rarely acknowledged in polite company. These explicit
depictions are even more radical coming from a woman writer, when
women are, even to this day, generally expected to keep our bodily
fluids well out of sight and out of mind. Part of Colquhoun’s
approach may have been a Surrealist exercise. Surrealism was and is
disruptive to its very core, seeking to unlock the unconscious and to
display taboo, dismemberment and horror, often with a generally
Freudian sensibility. Yet while Colquhoun’s work can occasionally
be macabre, and certainly shocking, she generally does not focus on
the overtly morbid (although there are some exceptions). While there
is no doubt that some of her prose was meant to shock, the clinical
way in which she writes of things that drip and ooze itself is oddly
alienating.
Colquhoun’s
writing style in general leans toward cold observation, and this is
true of even her most Surrealist writings. Although she uses thick
description with respect to color and setting and her imagery is
consistently rich, even the most bizarre activities in Colquhoun’s
writings, including, sex, magic, incest and cannibalism, are depicted
quite dispassionately. Colquhoun’s unpublished autobiography Until
Twelve,
likely written in the 1940s, would have us believe that keen
observation was a trait she admired in herself from a very young age.
Although her writings about her childhood observations are clearly
filtered through an adult lens, she didn’t flinch from honest,
seemingly detached reporting of her youthful encounters with sex,
menstruation and the pubescent development of young bodies. Her short
prose poems from the 1940s and 1950s retain an icy, objective flavor,
reading as field notes from an anthropological expedition even when
describing edgy subjects such as the prostitutes she carefully
observed in her short prose poem titled Sligo
Street, 1939.
However, her depictions of waste elimination, while also taboo, offer
different challenges to the viewer, and perhaps also some
opportunities.
Although
Colquhoun’s depictions of bodily waste were often matter of fact,
they were also ironically tinged with the wider grasping of the
ultimate which marked her life’s work. Despite the somewhat
clinical treatment, Colquhoun juxtaposes urination and defecation
with moments of wonder and transcendence, placing the sacred and
profane in proximity, forcing the reader to accept the holy nature of
the physical body. In one short prose poem, “Alchemical Text” the
physics of urination encourage a meditation upon gender equality and
embodiment:
“He
said, quoting a sage, that every girl had her roots in earth. I said,
where does every boy have his roots? He answered “In the sphere
where fireworks explode”. I understood by this the polarity of
alchemical earth and air, but wondered if it were valid. For if this
distinction was, as it must have been, based upon different methods
of making water, then certainly a girl’s water goes directly
downwards into the earth; but a boy’s also must eventually return
there, and for all its rocket like soaring, is bound at last for
earth. “[1]
Another
short piece “Images of Joy”, likely written in the 1940s or
possibly late 1930s is a short recollection, likely from her time in
Greece in the early 1930s, where Colquhoun has an uncommonly
aesthetic response to the fecal remains of a wandering peasant:
“I
was sitting on a rock between mountains and sea and the sun was
blazing down on the aloes, and I thought I was alone. But presently I
heard a step and a peasant came along who thought he was alone and
let down his pants and had a good shit. It was done in a minute with
complete simplicity; he pulled them up again, not wiping his arsehole
with so much as a leaf, fastened his belt and walked away.
I
went forward to look at what he had done; it was beautiful, three
concentric rings of golden brown, decorated like a cake with olive
stones and shreds of tomato peel. The topmost ring ended in a little
point aiming at the sky. I think the whole lot must have come away
clean without leaving a trace; perhaps the intestine had come out a
little way like an animal’s to form a funnel, though maybe there
was a small stain on his trousers all the same. “[2]
In
two of Colquhoun’s longer form writings she juxtaposes urination
with sacred sites and landscape. In, The
Blue Anoubis,
her unpublished 1966 travelogue about Egypt, she describes hiking up
her skirts to pee behind a pyramid.[3] In her slightly earlier
Surrealist novel I
Saw Water,
about an order of parthenogenic nuns existing in a shadowy afterlife,
Colquhoun much more irreverently counterpoints the body and the altar
as sites of sacred activity. The central character of the story, a
postulant at the nunnery, finds herself exploring the convent church,
when, at one of the altars in a side chapel, she lifts the top off
the altar to find it covering a cistern. Overtaken by the urge to
urinate she relieves herself in it, wiping herself with letters she
finds in her pockets. She only gives the incident the briefest
thought when a priest arrives, appearing to not have noticed or
cared. Is the implication one of sacrilege, as she uses the altar in
a way clearly unintended, or was the altar actually covering up a
toilet? The sacred and the profane blur, or perhaps they were always
one and the same. [4]
It
is likely that Colquhoun was working to prompt a spiritual shift in
the reader by elevating the debased and by making no one thing
greater than any other. A key may lie in comment she makes in another
short essay “Hexentanz”, which details sticky bodily fluids and
the taste of ear wax: “Life is not beautiful but it is rich: All
must be accepted.” [5] A lifelong animist with an interest in
Tantra, Colquhoun wished to confront generally accepted standards of
sacrality by uplifting and acknowledging that which is most degraded.
While still quite young, at the age of 24, she delivered a paper to
the Search Society, a group of occult writers and thinkers led by her
distant cousin Edward Garstin, titled “The Connection Between
Mysticism and Blasphemy”. Here she challenges standard conventions
of blasphemy by arguing that the blasphemous creates the conditions
for divine encounters:
“Thus,
though the blasphemer may be said to lower the divine, while the
mystic raises himself to meet his Lord, yet in fact both perform the
same process, that of bringing the divine and the human into contact.
Since any vehicle cannot be unworthy of divinity, the doctrine of the
Incarnate God and the whole train of sacramental teaching that
follows in its wake is in this sense blasphemous...”[6]
By collapsing
the categories of the sacred and the blasphemous one can reach an
experience where nothing can be destroyed. She states “Where
there is nothing, there is God.” “And if all can be destroyed,
why, let there be destruction.”
During the late 1920s
and early 1930s Colquhoun also encountered Hindu Tantra, a tradition
with which she felt some affinity due to her birth in the north of
India, through the writings of John Woodroffe (Arthur Avalon) and
those of her cousin Edward Garstin. It seems quite possible that as
she developed as a writer and artist that she extended her ideas
about blasphemy into breaking taboos as a way of experiencing
enlightenment and non-attachment as part of a Tantrically inspired
esoteric framework.
Were
Colquhoun’s literary scatological episodes a Surrealist exercise in
shattering taboos? Simple juxtaposition of opposing images?
Tantrically inspired sacramental meditations? Regardless of intent,
she was likely considering some aspect of spiritual refinement,
hoping to bring her audience along with her, changing our
perspectives and cultivating a new way of seeing. Can’t exactly say
that this tendency endeared her to publishers, but I don’t think
she ever believed that her work was for the masses anyway.
Notes
Images
© Samaritans, Noise Abatement Society and Spire Healthcare.
1.
“Alchemical Text” in Shillitoe, Richard (ed). Medea’s
Charms: Selected Shorter Writings of Ithell Colquhoun.
(London: Peter Owen Publishers, 2019) p. 116.
2.
“Images of Joy” ibid.
pp. 132–133, and in the Tate Hyman Kreitman Archives at TGA
929/2/1/52/38.
3.
Colquhoun, Ithell, The
Blue Anoubis
unpublished mss, c. 1967. Tate Hyman Kreitman Archives, TGA
929/2/1/6/8
4.
Colquhoun, Ithell, (eds.) Richard Shillitoe and Mark Morrison, I
Saw Water: An Occult Novel and Other Selected Writings
(University Park, Penn State University Press, 2014). Kindle edition,
location 1435.
5.
“Hexentanz” exists in several versions. This quote was from the
mss. TGA 929/2/1/52/56
5.
Colquhoun, Ithell “The Connection Between Mysticism and Blasphemy”
c. 1928/1929 unpublished mss. Tate Hyman Kreitman Archives, TGA
929/2/3/2
Ithell
Colquhoun’s Peculiar Scatological Proclivities. By
Amy Hale. Medium, May 4, 2020
Writer
and researcher Dr. Richard Shillitoe discusses the life and work of
British artist, writer and occultist Ithell Colquhoun. As the talk
sets out to show, she took her inspiration from the spiritual world
as much as she did from the natural world, making extensive use of
automatic drawing and painting methods as well as the contents of her
dreams.
Ithell
Colquhoun (1906-1988) is one of the 20th century’s most
significant British surrealist artists. The daughter of a senior
civil servant in India, she studied at the Slade School of Fine Art
(1927-31) and had an award-winning painting exhibited in 1931 at the
Royal Academy. She travelled widely in Mediterranean countries and
lived in London before spending the greater part of her adult life in
Cornwall where she painted, wrote and pursued extensive occult
research. In 1940 she was ejected from the London Surrealist Group
for refusing to compromise her occult interests. Her paintings have
appeared in solo exhibitions as well as being shown in major art
galleries. A significant body of Colquhoun’s artworks and archives
were acquired by Tate in 2019, gifted by the National Trust. Her fame
as a writer is largely based on a hermetic novel, Goose of
Hermogenes, and two highly personal travelogues The Crying of
the Wind: Ireland and The Living Stones: Cornwall. She also
published Sword of Wisdom, the authoritative biography of
MacGregor Mathers, the founder of the Hermetic Order of the Golden
Dawn. She died in Cornwall in 1988.
Dr
Richard Shillitoe is an independent researcher. His book Ithell
Colquhoun: Magician Born of Nature (2010) includes an
extensive catalogue of Colquhoun’s artwork. He co-edited the first
publication of Colquhoun’s novel I Saw Water (2014) and
edited the illustrated edition of her first novel Goose of
Hermogenes (2018). He has recently published Medea’s
Charms (2019), a volume of Colquhoun’s poems, essays and short
stories. He maintains the website www.ithellcolquhoun.co.uk
Magician
Born of Nature: the Life and Work of Ithell Colquhoun. Drawing Room,
October 13, 2020
