In 1907, Ithell Colquhoun (pronounced “Eye-thell Co-hoon”), at the age of one, arrived in England with her family from India, where her father had been part of the colonial service. She would never go back to the country of her birth. A sense of this early dislocation from a mystical land nagged at her for the rest of her life, and was one of the motivations that drove her art and her writing for more than 60 years. She wrote of India that: “My origin was there, and there I would return, other than in dreams.” She declared herself with such certainty because she believed that a mesh of spiritual connections that transcended time and place lay beneath the physical world. There were, therefore, concealed knowledge and hidden realms ripe for discovery by adherents of the arcane arts.
Colquhoun’s early decades coincided with the “Occult Revival” of the late-19th and early-20th centuries, and she would prove to be a lifelong and exceptionally dedicated student, both as a painter and writer, and as a member of any number of spiritualist groups, from Druidry and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, to the Golden Section Order and the Fellowship of Isis. To these she added mystical philosophies from theosophy and the Jewish Kabbalah to alchemy and Hindu and Buddhist tantric traditions, and Celtic lore. Somewhere in this mishmash of ancient wisdoms, linked by Earth and sexual energies, and with the natural world as its key, lay the possibility of redemption and a return to a prelapsarian divine state.
The exact nature of Colquhoun’s beliefs will remain opaque to most but, as with the Swedish esoteric artist Hilma af Klint, her pictures stand as a record of her investigations and interests. Colquhoun (1906-88) is the subject of two Tate exhibitions this year, first at Tate St Ives and in a slightly different version in June at Tate Britain. The exhibitions show something of the range of her work from the mid 1920s to the mid 1980s, and the variety of styles she adopted. What remained consistent across the years is that her art was almost without exception profoundly strange.
The works of her student years at the Slade School of Art deal largely with myth, such as the Judgement of Paris (1930), and feature muscly figures with more than a hint of William Blake and Henry Fuseli; there followed dry-brush works showing eerily empty buildings in the style of Algernon Newton, and then plant studies where the pulse of sap is almost tangible.
Then, in 1931, she visited Paris and encountered the surrealists. Their fascination with the unconscious helped align her artistic and mystical interests. What she adopted most enthusiastically was automatism – painting and drawing left to the unconscious, the hand being merely a tool for channelling other forces. Among her most striking images are her decalcomania pictures, made by dribbling colour onto a board, putting a sheet of paper on top and pressing, then peeling off the board and sheet to reveal mirrored random smudges. Colquhoun would interpret these as angels or Gorgons, falling figures or caverns. She would give these form by working them with defined strokes, teasing out shapes and figures from the blobs. The results are unnerving, otherworldly and almost fungal pictures – full of brilliantly coloured spores, polyps and bulgings. Decalcomania was one of several automatism techniques she described in a 1949 article called “The Mantic Stain”.
Colquhoun was to break with the British surrealists in 1940 when she refused to comply with a demand from the group’s leader, ELT Mesens, that members should have no other affiliations. She was unwilling to sacrifice her occult memberships and went her own way. It was also during the early 1940s that she first started to visit Cornwall. She hired a simple studio near Lamorna, named Vow Cave, with no running water or electricity and, inspired by the rich deposits of standing stones, circles and weathered stone crosses in the area, delved deeper into Celtic mythology.
As she wrote in The Living Stones: Cornwall (1957) – part psychogeography, part handbook to the county – “unless you like granite, you will not find happiness there”. She did, believing that the structure of the region’s rocks “gives rise to the psychic life of the land”. Divining a lineage that included both Merlin and Atlantis, Colquhoun sensed an energy in the Earth that predated the concept of ley lines, and saw the standing stones as living things: “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 county’s inner life.”
In her piece Landscape with Antiquities (Lamorna) (1950) she offered a bird’s-eye view of some of this granite army – a mystical Ordnance Survey map, with lanes and fields demarcated and ripples of energy emanating from the stones that act as outlets of subterranean power. She included a circle known as the Merry Maidens, a ring of 19 stones said to be a loop of girls petrified as punishment for dancing on the Sabbath: two huge upright stones nearby are the pipers who played them to their doom.
An earlier version of this haunting tale, with a skein of energy lines conforming to the Druidical system of colour (colour and sound were for Colquhoun a means of approaching the fourth dimension), had appeared in 1942. Dance of the Nine Opals shows the stones as capsules of pulsing magma, linked to one another and to the Earth around an upright that is both maypole and Kabbalah’s tree of life. In a 1944 poem, “Les Grandes Transparentes”, she wrote of the presiding spirits: “They are both here and there, they penetrate all ways/They go both north and south, they are past and to come/They pierce all directions at once”. Their tracks can be traced here.
In the Sunset Birth (1942), she painted another well-known stone group, Mên-an-Tol – a pierced stone flanked by two uprights. She had once wriggled through the hole-stone hoping for a cure for rheumatism but was “disappointed with the result”, having failed to recall that for it to be efficacious, she needed to be naked. In the painting, strings of coloured energy delineate the shape of a woman stretched through the hole and touching the bookend stones – creating a circuit board of spiritual and ecological energy. At exactly this time, Barbara Hepworth was experimenting with string sculptures just a few miles across the moors at St Ives.
Colquhoun continued her pictorial-occult researches into her old age. From 1962 she signed her works with a monogram, or sigil, reflecting the magic name she adopted, Splendidior Vitro (“more sparkling than crystal”). It was in this guise that in 1977 she created a set of tarot cards, which she named Taro, in which she replaced the traditional imagery of Lovers, the Hanged Man, Stars and Moon and the like with abstract pools of enamel paint. Stare long enough and a message would manifest through the retinal imprint.
“After the winnowing out of phantasy, what remains?” she asks in The Living Stones. The answer would seem to be that Colquhoun was no winnower: for her art and magic were the same thing.
Ithell Colquhoun: Between Worlds
Tate St Ives. Until 5 May 2025, and then at Tate Britain June to October 2025
[See also: Tirzah Garwood’s English satires]
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This article appears in the 05 Feb 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The New Gods of AI