In 1948, on BBC television, the artist Ithell Colquhoun demonstrated mysterious methods of summoning the spirit world into her work. For fumage, she passed a sheet of paper above a lit candle to create smoky trails. For parsemage, she sprinkled chalk over water to capture the patterns on paper. For décalcomanie, she achieved Rorschach-style images by pressing paint between papers.
The exhibition “Ithell Colquhoun: Between Worlds” opens today at the Tate seaside branch in St. Ives, Cornwall. In that ancient landscape—which became a place of magical connections for the artist-writer-poet-sorceress during the Second World War—Colquhoun found that the craggy cliffs and wild shores helped her access the vital forces among all living things and the beyond. She sought to transform herself and society, not through intellectual analysis but through the alchemy of the unconscious.
