Colquhoun’s art is an art of transformation. Its origins are multiple, deriving from Breton’s exhortation to the surrealists to transform the world, from the alchemists’ attempts to transform matter and from the magicians’ attempts to transform themselves. It encompasses both physical change and spiritual metamorphosis.
In this section I shall concentrate upon her use of alchemy and her enduring preoccupation with states of change that occur in nature; those moments of instability when something is neither one thing nor the other but possesses qualities of both.
continue to next section: alchemy