STALACTITE, 1962
Oil on board. 58 x 14in. (147.4 x 35.0cm.)
Signed with an early variant of the monogram and dated lower right. Inscribed with title and dated 1962 on the reverse.
Provenance
Sotheby’s studio sale, London, 24th April 1985, lot 545.
With the Pruskin Gallery in 1985.
Sotheby's, London 7th March 1990 Lot 388 as oil on board. Illustrated in b/w in the catalogue.
Christie’s South Kensington, 14th October 2004. Lot 312.
Private collection.
Exhibited
London, FBA Galleries, 1963, No. 227.
Berlin, Kunstamt Wilmersdorf, 1969, No. 6, as Tropfstein.
Bristol, Bristol Arts Centre, 1970, No. 4.
Exeter, City of Exeter Art Gallery, 1972, No. 18, as oil on canvas.
London, Blond Fine Art, 1985, No. 48.
This tall, narrow painting has an elongated form that echoes the tall, thin form of the stalactite that dominates the left-hand side of the painting. The setting is inside a sea-bound grotto, looking through a small aperture out to the sea and a land mass beyond, giving the painting a dramatic sense of depth. The painting makes direct references to sexuality and the sexual forms contained within nature. Rock formations in the foreground have clear labial forms, balancing the phallic stalactite. In Stalactite, a dramatically elongated oil painting, the viewer is situated in the deep recesses of a cave and looks out, along the passageway, past the phallic stalactite, over the mysterious rockpools to the sea and clitoris-shaped island beyond.
Because of their vulva-like entrances into mother earth, and the link that they make between the surface and the womb-like underworld, caves occupy a special place in myth and legend. Caves also held esoteric significance for Colquhoun. She regarded them as power-centres of the earth: ‘I realized that the Earth is a being and that certain places on its surface leading to its interior are conducive to different kinds of esoteric perception.’ (Unpublished dream diaries.) She described such places as ‘Fountains out of Hecate’, using the terminology of Kenneth Grant, and as ‘the mundane chakras of the Earth.’
For Grant, Hecate symbolises the transformation from watery, or astral existence, to earthy, or tangible, being.
Several studies for this work are known.
