Not Without My Ghosts: The Artist As Medium

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Glynn Vivian Art Gallery is delighted to announce the opening of, Not without My Ghosts, an international exhibition ranging from the late 19th century to the present day, looking at how artists’ have engaged with séances, channelling, automatic writing and other paranormal investigations. The Hayward Gallery Touring exhibition, in partnership with Drawing Room, features around 50 exhibits spanning from paintings, works on paper, installation, video and animation.

The works on display reflect the creation of art as a process of opening up to receive and channel forces that expand the limits of human experience. For some artists, their works function as evidence of another realm of existence, while others navigate hidden and visible worlds as a response to the complexity and strangeness of life. The exhibition includes a large proportion of work by female artists, illustrating how it has primarily been women who have engaged with and interpreted spirit art and how their artistic endeavours have strong roots in the history of feminism.

The research-based exhibition will shed light on how the tropes of the ghostly and the spectral, from having been widely condemned as aesthetically illegitimate and politically dangerous, have since become important for the articulation of history, cultural memory, and contemporary life. In their critiques of individual authorship and artistic autonomy, intertwined with human experience, the exhibition will argue how spirit and mediumistic art anticipated many of the ongoing preoccupations of contemporary artists working today and is overdue a cultural reassessment.

Not Without My Ghosts takes as its starting point the visionary work of William Blake, alongside the largely forgotten Victorian spirit artists Georgiana Houghton and Barbara Honywood. Their work, based on experiences and communication with the world of the spirits, was strikingly at odds with prevailing traditions of artistic expression.

The exhibition also chronicles the Surrealists’ experiments with automatism, going on to look at how 20th century artists like Austin Osman Spare, Ithell Colquhoun and Cameron combined techniques drawn from automatism with an interest in occultist rituals. Moving into the present day, works by Emma Talbot, Suzanne Treister, Lea Porsager and Louise Despont demonstrate how contemporary artists continue to use the power of the unseen and uncanny to explore the ambiguities of the world around them.

Not Without My Ghosts includes work by Noviadi Angkasapura, William Blake, Cameron, Ann Churchill, Ithell Colquhoun, Louise Despont, Casimiro Domingo, Madame Fondrillon, Chiara Fumai, Vidya Gastaldon, Madge Gill, Susan Hiller, Barbara Honywood, Georgiana Houghton, Augustin Lesage, Pia Lindman, Ann Lislegaard, Jock Macdonald, André Masson, Grace Pailthorpe, František Jaroslav Pecka, Olivia Plender, Sigmar Polke, Lea Porsager, Austin Osman Spare, Emma Talbot, Yves Tanguy, and Suzanne Treister with The Museum of Blackhole Spacetime Collective.

Glynn Vivian has also programmed two exhibitions by two Wales based artists whose work also responds to the themes in Not Without My Ghosts.  Fern Thomas’ exhibition Spirit Mirror  will be drawing on her research into local suffragist, politician, philanthropist and spiritualist Winifred Coombe Tennant (1874 – 1956), whose home in Neath was originally located not far from where Thomas grew up. The artist brings together her own work and works from our permanent collection to consider recurring themes such as mythology and folklore in her practice. We are also showing the work of Zoe Preece, whose exhibition In Reverence uses expertly crafted objects such as kitchen utensils and other objects made in porcelain and wood. In her work, she explores themes of domesticity, memory and absence through these ghostly objects.