St Ives, England – For Ithell Colquhoun, the world was alive. Energies, mythical forces and solar alignments imbued with landscapes with powers that have woven human beings, ecologies and cosmos together, and these energies have approached the surface in the west of Cornwall. It was here, therefore, that she has chosen to settle in her last years, with a small studio just a few kilometers from the place where Tate St Ives is now. After his death, his archives spread between the Tate and the National Trust, and his reputation has decreased. In recent years, however, his articles have been gathered and examined for the first time, which has resulted in the greatest exhibition ever made of the strange and experimental work of Colquhoun.
The featured work of art of this exhibition is the painting “Scylla (Mediterranean)” (1938), in which a pair of fleshy rock formations emerges from clear water, with a tuft of algae in the shape of hair nestled in the slit at their bases. The text of the wall quotes Colquhoun, who said that the work “was suggested by what I could see in a bath”. With this explanation, the image is resolved in clarity then return to uncertainty. The work is filled with associations: eroded cliffs are female legs, but they also look like a pair of phallus. A sharp boat goes towards the vaginal opening between them, simultaneously smooth and violent. For Colquhoun, the work was an “double -image dual image” surrealist “, in which the spectator sees several things at a time.
The landscape of “Scylla (Mediterranean)” is alive in a way that speaks of the beliefs of Colquhoun as an occultist, embracing and reviving ancient philosophical practices surrounding animism, mysticism, alchemy and the ritual. Here, as elsewhere, she combined these ideas with her interest in surrealism and connected techniques such as automatic drawing and decalcomania, which consists in applying paint spots and supporting them with paper, before “reading” the textures and the reasons resulting as if divided tea.
For the first time, some of Colquhoun's Decalcomania paintings are presented alongside the counterpart pages she used to press the paint, offering an intriguing overview of her process. In “attributes of the moon” (1947), colquhoun loves the forms of texture in a figure of goddess locked in a pink cave similar to a uterus, walking on a tangle of plant roots and a returned moon crescent. He speaks of a spirituality which transcends a specific culture, by relying rather on a lasting understanding of the sacred which was Popular among contemporaries of ColquhounLike Max Ernst and Leonora Carrington.
The range of spiritual interests of Colquhoun is confirmed in a demonstration of personal sketches exploring everything, theoretical spatial diagrams representing additional dimensions and the Kabatical Tree of Life, chakras and the conjunction of male and female energies. A tiny particularly interesting sketch shows the intertwined bodies of two female lovers, one in blue and one with red ink, suggesting the union of gender energies even in homosexual encounters.
The exhibition reaches its pinnacle in a room dedicated to the paintings of Colquhoun of old stone formations, several of which in the neighboring Cornwall campaign. “The birth of the sunset” (c. 1942) is an extraordinary representation of a local stone pierced with a hole, through which people would climb into a fertility rite. In colquhoun's painting, the stones seem to shine from the inside, surrounded by colored energy lines rooted in the depths of the translucent earth. It is a strange but convincing image, full of a magic that Colquhoun felt herself. It is to the credit of this generous and expansive exhibition that he offers a space so that the works of Colquhoun sing in all their strangeness – and all their unidentifiable power.
Ithell colquhoun: between the worlds Continue to Tate St Ives (Porthmeor Beach, Saint Ives,, United Kingdom) until May 5, before going to Tate Britain, London, from June to October. The exhibition was organized by Katy Norris with Emma Sharples in consultation with Amy Hale, Alyce Mahon and Richard Shillitoe.
