Colquhoun was drawn, not only by transformation itself, but to those places which are most propitious for metamorphosis. Volcanoes, caves, rockpools and fountains, to select some of her favourite examples, may be said to form a permeable interface between the physical and spiritual worlds. They occupy an ambiguous space between worlds: numinous places of great potency.
Such places are not exclusive to the natural world. Areas of the built environment may act as thresholds to the sacred. A particular type of transition occurs at a doorway. Entrances and exits mark stages in a physical journey and they can mark the stages of a spiritual journey. The qabalistic Tree of Life with its different paths and different levels of consciousness is a series of gateways. The Portal Ceremony of the Golden Dawn, which marked the transition from the Outer Order to the Inner Order, required the initiate to pass through a physical portal of two columns. The Good Angel and the Evil Angel depicted in Marlowe's Faust (1931) leave and enter the stage by separate doors labelled Ego Dominus tuus and Diabolus deus inversus. In Greek mythology, dreams entered consciousness through the Gates of Hypnos. Gate of Ivory and Gate of Horn (1952) refers to the belief that false, or deceptive dreams emerged through the Gate of Ivory whilst true dreams came through the Gate of Horn.
The portrait Humfry Gilbert Garth Payne (1934) depicts the archaeologist leaning against a door frame. Archaeological excavation is a portal linking the present with the past. The archaeologist dissects the earth, peels back the skin of the landscape and reveals the life of the past.
At the time of her death, Colquhoun possessed very few photographs of herself as an adult. They are now in the Tate Archive. Of the few that were taken of her (or, of those which she chose to retain), there are two of her at Vow Cave, the studio in the Lamorna Valley, Cornwall, and which date from some time in the 1950s. Both of these show the artist standing at thresholds. In one she is looking out over the garden gate. In the other she is inside the studio, leaning on the bottom half of the stable-type door, looking out. A two piece stable door, it should be noted is capable of being both closed and open at the same time.
A stairway is another place of transition. In Santa Warna’s Wishing Well (1947), Linked Islands (I), Linked Islands (II) (1947) and St. Elmo (1948) a flight of steps is used to depict the saint’s holy well and symbolise the emergence of the holy waters from the underworld to the surface. Similarly, a flight of steps forms the central image of Garden of Adonis (1945), symbolizing regeneration.
In the mundane world, a mirror can do no more than reflect the light that touches its surface. In the magical world, this limitation may no apply. The heroine of a short story The Return wakes from sleep in a strange room and is reassured by the absence of a mirror: ‘she always sensed an uncanny quality in such reflecting surfaces – might not something more be returned than was put in?’ (1) Death of a Vampire in a Magic Mirror (c. 1945) defies this fact. By tradition, vampires do not have reflections, and only a truly magical mirror could return the reflection of a creature that does not possess one. The reflection in Mirror Overflowing (1976) is not constrained by the laws of optics, but spills over the edge of the frame and begins to seep down the handle. The image that Colquhoun’s mirror cannot contain, however, is blank. How can a mirror reflect absence, and how can that absence be so large that it cannot be contained but must overflow the frame? Perhaps, like the mirror of the scryer, it is blank so that the viewer may project into it their boundless imagination.
Notes
1. The manuscript is at TGA 929/2/1/38.
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