COMMUNICATING VESSELS, 1941
Watercolour. 16 x12¼in. (41.2 x 31.6cm.)
Inscribed on the reverse: ‘Alchemical Figure’ + title +1941
Provenance
National Trust bequest.
The work is unframed and has probably never been exhibited.
The title derives from Les Vases Communicants, the title of a formative text by André Breton, published in 1932. The title itself refers to scientific experiments in which liquids or gasses pass back and forth between two joined receptacles until they reach equilibrium. Breton believed that this was the perfect metaphor for the relationship that ought to exist between the dreaming and the waking states: “It is my desire that [Surrealism] be best recognised for having attempted to set up a line of communication between the over-disassociated worlds of sleep and wakefulness, of interior and exterior reality, of reason and folly, of the calm of knowledge and of love, of life for the sake of life and of Revolution.”
At one level, Colquhoun's image is a literal one, as a bottle pours its contents into a beaker. The vastness of the containers that fill the sky and dominate the land surface below, suggests that she was also alert to the alchemical associations.
See also Les Vases Communicants (André Breton), 1948 for a related work.