Alchemy

 

Alchemy provided Colquhoun with far more than a rich source of verbal and visual images. It located her creativity within a philosophical and spiritual context.  It enabled her to link the spiritual with the surreal. Art and alchemy represent linked routes to spiritual self-development.

 

The intellectual background against which alchemical activities took place changed over time, but always contained components of the mystical and the empirical. Some alchemists engaged primarily in the refinement of matter whilst others, for others, the task was inner purification. Today, alchemy is generally thought of in material terms - the quest for the philosopher’s stone, the transforming agent that would convert base metals into gold. Its spiritual dimension, for which the physical quest is a metaphor, is generally overlooked.

 

For many alchemists the Jewish Qabalah provided the intellectual context. The fall of Adam produced the chaos of matter from which the alchemists hoped to return it to its original paradisial state. One aspect of the fall of Adam was the fall of man from his original unity into a world of gendered opposites. To reunite Adam with his separated female aspect was to achieve the Great Work. The climax is the moment of conjunctio; the conjunction of male and female principles in the marriage of heaven and earth, of fiery spirit and watery matter. The self knowledge that arises from the alchemical search has a healing, redemptive quality for both practitioner and cosmos. The process of uncovering the divine dimension of Nature moves the practitioner into a more harmonious relationship with universal wholeness.

 

With its requirement to resolve and unite opposites, alchemy shared much in common with surrealism.  Surrealist techniques such as the use of collage, constructions and found objects are alchemic in the sense that they fuse the source materials into a transformed whole.  André Breton acknowledged these links, making the association very clear in the Second Manifesto of Surrealism, published in 1929. (1) 

 

Colquhoun, too, made explicit the links between alchemy and surrealism and drew out the spiritual dimension.  In an early piece The Waterstone of the Wise (2) Colquhoun took her title from the classic text by Johann Ambrosius Siebmacher, first published in 1619.  This was a text in which Siebmacher attempted to link alchemy with Christianity: to associate the magical substance, the Philosopher’s Stone with Christ, the Corner Stone.  In her text, Colquhoun also used the language of alchemy and the language of poetry to describe the surrealist quest for liberty and the resolution of opposites.  Release the power that lies in “the region between sleeping and waking”, says Colquhoun,  and the world will move beyond divisions to the state of “the hermaphrodite whole, opposites bound together in mitigating embrace.” Pressing home the point, writing of the conjunction of opposites, she used the traditional alchemical image of twins; “a boy and a girl, perpetually joined together…united face to face, having passed forward to the condition of the androgynous egg.”

 

Alchemical transformation and poetic metamorphosis are two sides of the same coin. From the late middle ages, alchemical texts were frequently expressed in a coded language that contrived, simultaneously, to describe the work and to conceal it from outsiders.  It is the paradox of concealed revelation.  Information is available to the many, but understanding is only available to the few. 

 

This symbolism was also expressed in illustrative woodcuts and engravings.  Colquhoun made occasional use of traditional alchemical symbols of this sort in her visual work. For example, The female aspect of matter – philosophical mercury – is often depicted in alchemy as a queen or as the moon. In Attributes of the Moon, (1947) a major oil decalcomania, a female figure stands upon a crescent moon beneath tented labial folds.  She consists of cloudy, billowy forms and wears a crown of ten silver spheres.

More commonly Colquhoun’s works are inspired by alchemical apparatus      (Communicating Vessels 1941) processes and materials (Philosophers Stone 1942) and alchemical figures (The Homunculus I (1940) and Alchemical Figure: Androgyne (1941).

 

The transformation of matter leads to the formation of new matter and new life.  Colquhoun frequently takes us to the birth of stars and nebulae and the emergence of organic life from the ancient ooze (Primordial Slime, 1977).  The Long Journey (1946), which has the appearance of linked alchemical retorts, plays with the paradox of scale.  It is, simultaneously, the size of the cosmos and the size of a microscopic particle.  The forms in A Visitation I (1945) show the generation of life from gaseous and liquid components.  Art is frequently born out of death, existing in the shadow of the Other World. In these works, however, Colquhoun takes art out of the mortuary and moves it into the delivery suite. 

 

Notes

1.  Breton, A., Second Surrealist Manifesto.  Published in English translation in Seaver, R. and Lane, H.R. Manifestos of Surrealism, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1967.

2.  Colquhoun, I. The Water Stone of the Wise in: A Comfort and J Bayliss, (eds.) New Road, 1943. Gray Walls Press, Billericay, Essex.  pp. 196-9.

 

 

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