Ithell Colquhoun Between the Sacred and the Profane
When it came to pushing people’s buttons, Ithell Colquhoun leaned right into it. In both her visual art and her writing Colquhoun confronted her audiences with images that are explicit, beautifully erotic and also repulsive, promoting encounters with the divine through transgression and the abject. The potential for public engagement with her bold ideas was clearly something Colquhoun valued. On more than one occasion gallerists refused to hang a painting of hers that was considered to be too scandalous, and she would replace it with something just as juicy, as she was generally uncompromising about what she thought needed to be seen. Between 1939 and 1943 Colquhoun developed what appeared to have been a complex system of sex magic including images of queer desire and explicit diagrammatic depictions of sexual positions and women’s pleasure. Although until recently most of these images were never displayed there is no question that she intended for many of these quite radical pieces to have an audience. In her writings, Colquhoun depicted a variety of forbidden topics in a manner both horrific and coldly detached, including incest and a range of bodily functions and conditions. Her vignettes and prose poems referred to excreta, menstruation, skin conditions, scabs, open sores, and decay. While many of the more shocking pieces were never published for obvious reasons, the manuscript treatment of the drafts indicated her hopes that they would eventually be read.
This tantalizingly illustrated lecture will theorize Ithell Colquhoun’s tendency toward confrontation and taboo, the ways in which she challenged both her own boundaries and those of her imagined readers and viewers. With influences ranging from Tantra, to surrealism, the occult and Bataille, Colquhoun embraced transgression to drive her own enlightenment and also to shift and elevate perceptions of what can be seen and experienced as holy. In her words: “Life is not beautiful but it is rich: All must be accepted.”
Bio
Amy Hale is an Atlanta based writer and critic with a PhD in Folklore and Mythology from UCLA (1998). She has written widely on artist and occultist Ithell Colquhoun, and has been an academic advisor to the 2025 Colquhoun retrospective at Tate St. Ives and Tate Britain. She wrote the first scholarly biography of Colquhoun, Ithell Colquhoun: Genius of the Fern Loved Gully (Strange Attractor, 2020) followed by the collection Sex Magic: Diagrams of Love, (Tate Publishing, 2024), and the forthcoming A Walking Flame: Selected Magical Essays of Ithell Colquhoun (Strange Attractor 2025). She is also the editor of the groundbreaking collection Essays on Women in Western Esotericism: Beyond Seeresses and Sea Priestesses (Palgrave 2022). She has written extensively on magic and contemporary art, and has written for Tate, Burlington Contemporary, Art UK, The Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Correspondences Journal and other institutions. She is an Honorary Research Fellow with Falmouth University in Cornwall, a trustee of the UK Charity Rediscovering Art by Women (RAW) and a member of the British Art Network. Beyond the Supernatural: Magic in Contemporary Art is due to be published with Tate Publishing in 2026.
