Surrealism, Automatism, and the Portals of Consciousness

Colquhoun’s early artistic trajectory aligned her with the Surrealist movement of the 1930s and 40s, but her obsession with the hidden forces of the universe set her apart. A practitioner of automatism, she conjured images from the depths of the subconscious, using techniques like decalcomania—pressing painted surfaces together to create spectral, unearthly forms beyond her conscious control. But for Colquhoun, this was not mere experimentation but an act of magic. Her essay The Mantic Stain (1949) delves into the spiritual dimensions of these techniques, suggesting that they unlock gateways to higher, possibly inhuman, planes of perception. Works such as Gorgon (1946) and Attributes of the Moon(1947) are eerie manifestations of this belief, haunted by unseen energies and the whispers of the beyond.

The Occult as a Creative Compass

To gaze upon Colquhoun’s work is to peer into an artist’s obsession with forces older than time itself. She immersed herself in alchemy, Kabbalah, Tantra, and Celtic mysticism, treating art as an extension of ritual. In Diagrams of Love(1940–42), she charts the merging of male and female energies into an androgynous cosmic whole—a theme deeply intertwined with her own fluid ideas of gender and divinity. The sacred geometries that ripple through her work suggest portals rather than static compositions, spaces where reality fractures and something unknowable bleeds through.

The Living Stones of Cornwall: A Haunted Landscape

The dark heart of Colquhoun’s vision found its physical locus in Cornwall, a land riddled with the vestiges of ancient rites. The region’s standing stones, pagan histories, and myths of the Sidhe (faerie folk) called to her, shaping her visual and written works alike. Dance of the Nine Opals (1942) captures the numinous hum of sacred stone circles, while her 1957 travelogue The Living Stones: Cornwall reads less like a guidebook and more like an invocation, attempting to unearth the slumbering spirits of the land. Cornwall, for Colquhoun, was not a backdrop—it was a sentient, enchanted presence, a liminal threshold between worlds.

The Final Alchemy: Tarot and the Abyss of Form

Colquhoun’s later works abandoned figuration entirely, dissolving into the purest distillation of her magical practice. Her enamel drip paintings and tarot card designsrepresent the final stage of her alchemical transmutation, a process through which she sought to unlock the secret architecture of existence. The exhibition’s final section will unveil her tarot deck, often considered the crowning achievement of her mystical career—a set of images that do not merely predict the future but rewrite reality itself.

Between Worlds: A Legacy Unearthed

For too long, Ithell Colquhoun’s work has lurked in the shadows, overshadowed by her male Surrealist contemporaries. With Between Worlds, Tate seeks to rectify this, unveiling her as a true magus of the artistic and esoteric realms. Her work does not merely depict the uncanny—it breathes with it. As the veil thins, Colquhoun’s art calls to those willing to step beyond the material, into the swirling darkness of the unknown. Her legacy is not merely one of Surrealism but of initiation into the strange, the liminal, and the profoundly magical.