There’s a witch in place mutating
Kate Southworth, June 2023. Written for The Order of the Sun and Moon catalogue.
Hoping for spiritual visions I spend much of my childhood slipping into day-dreams and painting. Illness and the concomitant stillness nurture a contemplative aspect to my somewhat restricted life. I draw. I paint. I find. I develop, or perhaps hold onto, a capacity to move easily into unconscious worlds, and to sense the enormity of the cosmos that surrounds it. I experience a kind of telepathic link to strangers, animals and plants; feel their distress and their joy. Discussions about socialism and equality provide balance. I begin to think about how to account for my experiences of the world, and why the categories available to me seem not to fit. I think the rational segregation of life devalues who I am and I set out to find the missing fragments. At the age of sixteen I begin to study painting, become politically active and, in a haphazard way, continue to explore and encounter the rich other worlds beyond the mundane. Seemingly isolated threads of magic, rituals, spells, yoga, esotericism, psychoanalysis, dialectical materialism, distributed networks, spirituality, alchemy come into my life and little by little I see that they are connected together through loops and holes; crochet-like. Thus, begins my alchemical life; the transformational dance between mercury and moon and sun. Luna and Sol approach with double-headed roses proffered the left-handed way. The dove’s rosary makes six. Blooms brush your chin and through heavy garments I feel your touch. We meet.
The Moon and The Sun, 2023. Oil on Canvas 50cm x 50 cm.
I think the soul paints itself transforming. I think, perhaps, there’s a witch in place mutating. Mostly, I struggle to perceive it; an almost-thing around which I unknowingly circumambulate. The nearness of it brings unusual contentment yet unfamiliar with the terrain I wander away lost. I plod on. Never really abandoning the mystic ways prompts patterns of devoted discovery. Indigo swoops its magic and that longed-for linking returns. It calls me home. The painting really begins with the emergence of the Prima Materia; an encounter that is not guaranteed, even though desired. Its bright blackness pulsates intensities that vibrate to my soul. If I project my unconscious web into matter, I also takes time to sit with what manifests. Sometimes, I brush away unfamiliar fragments too quickly; missing their touch. They return. Sometimes, with Luna’s aid, I feel them; recognise them without consciously knowing them, and listen in stillness. I sit with my work as if with a stranger, hearing it. It happens quietly; slipping along a border between invisible filament and rounded shape and it grows. Then on that loud stormy night I wake thinking myself dead. I dream abject emptiness until I hear them breathing alongside me. Hovering between almost unbearable intimacy and almost aloneness, telepathic moments seep into being and the traces paint my micro-decisions with something more. I see new forms emerge from the colours, lines, shapes. They seem to fade into different psychic registers, organs, energies, senses; each vibrating a different tone, speaking a different language. With Sol’s aid I learn not to dismiss their awkwardness too readily; and to question whose version of painting I’m inhabiting. I become a little more aware of how my body moves, how I feel, what I hear, as the brush touches the canvas. If I attempt to fit the contents to a pre-existing schema, it seems to fall apart. I continue, for a while, in the tight enclosure of the paintings until I feel invisible filaments linking me outwards. This bring relief and I begin to spin my threads towards it. A magic bead placed in the pocket, a joint awakening, differentiated for each, spell enacted. Through symbols, maps and diagrams I paint the strands to other psyches in the landscape: the veiled boat moored half way up a hill describes something real, and as I sits in silence with the painting, I seems to hear its story. The mutating witch feels brought to birth with cosmic spirit in the blackness teeming with life. A canvas, left-handedly knotted with uneven threads, sits in a cloud of vermillion. Its divine blackness embeds circles into three-dimensional space. Two strands loop wildly east to west, each with an almost twist, perhaps of infinity. The square holds itself cheerfully as something resolved-enough and its joyful imperfections radiate life.
Cosmic Landscape, 2003. Oil on Canvas, 80cm x 80cm
Alchemy begins with the emergence of the First Matter (Prima Materia) and ends with the creation of the Philosophers’ Stone (Lapis Philosophorum). The stone; a powder, a tincture, perhaps the Prima Materia itself, is, amongst other things, referred to as Lapis Occultus and Arcanum (mystery, deep secret, elixir, secret remedy). Once manifested, the ripened stone then transforms through four seasons; participating in calendrical processes and relations of gestation, birth, growth, blossoming, fading, dying, absence, emptiness and birth again. Sometimes alchemy appears to be paradoxical, sometimes nonsensical. It slides between layers of meaning in a single breath. What begins as something spiritual twists into magical, psychological, artistic, ethical, political, and technological and back again. This multi-dimensional orientation allows for all possibilities within and between its borders. Without borders alchemy falls into chaos, and it most surely isn’t chaos. Its organisational form, porous and shifting, manifests transformation; including its own transformation.
The Prima Materia, perhaps the most mysterious, complex concept in alchemy, has been described variously as sun, moon, sea, salt, love, consciousness, soul, dew, blood, urine, dirt, placenta and hundreds more concepts. Carl Jung described the Prima Materia as a projection of the unconscious, and in particular that aspect of the unconscious that he refers to as the Objective Psyche. He agreed with the alchemists that ‘when the idea of the Prima Materia is understood, the problem of alchemy is already half-solved, its questions half-answered’[1]. The Objective Psyche for Jung is part of the deepest layer of the unconscious; an archaic, instinctual realm shared by all humans. If the Prima Materia really is a projection of the objective psyche, then the Philosophers’ Stone (Lapis Philosophorum), is a projection of the Self; a powerful energy, which guides our perpetual unfolding towards becoming who we really are. It connects us to our being which includes the spiritual, the numinous, the transcendent. The Self is the source of the drive to individuate, to bring the conscious and the unconscious into optimal balance. In alchemy the soul builds the bridge between the spirt and the body. The unfiltered psychic experience of the objective psyche manifests itself as Archetypes; forms, patterns, elements which find expression in dreams, myths, fairy tales, religion and some forms of art.
For the alchemists the distinction between subject and object remained blurred, and the boundary between one and the other porous. Inner psychic states were projected outwards onto the material being examined, and qualities found in the material itself were regarded as part of alchemist’s inner world. The alchemists recorded in writings and drawings the results of their experiments with matter without codifying or interpreting them. As such, and in contrast to archetypal images contained within religious traditions, for example, they describe raw and immediate experiences of the unconscious. Contemporaneous and subsequent analyses of alchemists’ findings involve the introduction of conceptual frameworks, filters, through which to analyse the material. Jung’s conceptual framework included, amongst other things, the belief that parts of the psyche function outside of rational notions of time and space and that to account for the world in its entirety would require the conceptualisation of another dimension. He believed that the archetypes and figures within the objective psyche were a living reality, not restricted to the individual psyche, and in some way connected to a cosmic order[2].
Analysis of raw alchemic writings and drawings, then, encourages thinking about the ontological features of psyche; the range of processes and relations with which humans abstract ‘elements’ with which to think the world. If such elements pre-exist within the psyche and within the cosmos, it doesn’t necessarily follow that humans have evolved the capacity to fully perceive them. If they are devised by humans, upon what values are they based? These elements connect to the ways in which we paint, think, imagine, dream, define, remember, and reason.[3] For psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, the elements with which we think the world are inscribed in language, and through a child’s acquisition of language, a particular way of thinking the world and a particular way of being in the world is also acquired. This, he terms the Symbolic register and it resides within the unconscious. For German media theorist Friedrich Kittler, the Symbolic is not only inscribed in language, but also in technology. For Kittler, media determine our situation; they inscribe upon us their logic, their ways of working and we think the world through their filter. The Romantic poets and novelists managed to the weave the spiritual, the bodily and the emotional into the symbolic of the written word through which these non-rational qualities were ascribed value and meaning. Disrupted by the new technologies of the early twentieth century the Symbolic begins to look inwards towards its own functions and operations; restricting its sphere to the laws of abstraction themselves. Here, the spiritual, emotional and corporeal are denied entry into the Symbolic, and packed off into separate spheres – what Lacan, followed by Kittler, refers to as the psychic registers of the Imaginary and the Real. The imaginary tunes desire but is shaped by the Symbolic. The Real works in tension with the Symbolic and the Imaginary: It is impossible to express in language and is inaccessible to the Symbolic. However, the Real does not disappear, that which is unspeakable or unrepresentable will always return in the Real.
As the century advances, the passageway to meaning constricts and the correlation of the Symbolic with the computational intensifies. With the new digital and networked technologies, the language of the Symbolic speaks only rules, protocols, instructions, formulae; the last vestiges of the numinous, transcendent, spiritual aspects of psyche obliterated. Magic doesn’t disappear, it returns again in the Real. Distributed networks, such as the Internet and blockchain, replace centralised, hierarchical structures with distributed, flattened networks. Steeped in contradiction, they facilitate open, democratic, participative and collaborative processes and practices, yet at the same time operate by means and their specific operational force: protocol. This Network Symbolic becomes entirely unable to relate directly to the human. It re-categorises human subjectivity, activity and agency to ‘content’, incapable of effecting the system and upon which the logic of the system is inscribed. It incorporates and assimilates into its logic all the systems, conceptual frameworks, logics that facilitate human and machinic exchange. Now, we must challenge the very logic of the Network Symbolic as the only passage to meaning.
Artist and psychoanalyst, Bracha Ettinger, suggests that the Symbolic order, which informs much Western thought, does so under claims of neutrality and universality and she names it phallic: not as masculine, but as that which is premised on the oppositions, absence/presence, on/off, plus/minus. She conceptualises and theorises an expansion of the Lacanian Symbolic to accommodate the possibility of several supplementary signifiers that challenge the Phallus as the one and only sovereign signifier ruling the Symbolic[4]. The Phallic Symbolic has been challenged politically, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels through their work on the dialectical method through which, I suggest, they posit a rational and non-Phallic mode of abstracting elements with which the think the world.
Ettinger proposal of a supplementary space, the Matrix, within the Symbolic does not displace Phallic logic. It adds to the understanding of the psyche and radically expands ‘the range of processes and dimensions that constitute human subjectivity’ and the passage to meaning.202 Arising in the Real of the late stages of pregnancy, the archaic zone of pre-natal/pre-maternal human-becoming posits an archaic subjectivizing encounter that generates as its core elements a primordial severality defined by a shared borderspace and the operations of borderlinking. As a symbol, like the Phallus, the Matrix is not about literal or physiological organs. It captures the proto-psychic potentiality (for the becoming infant) and the traumatic psychic event (for the becoming mother) that shape the post-natal trauma/jouissance and the later phantasies and ultimately conceptualization of non- phallic relations between subjective entities. She proposes the concept of Metramorphosis as the means by which the elements that are excluded from and by the Symbolic order can be registered. A Matrixial Symbolic sphere allows for more than one signifier ruling the Symbolic.
Following Ettinger then, resistance to the intensification of rationalised, instrumentalised, commodified relations within the everyday, comes not with rejecting the system, for that falls prey to its defining Phallic logic; but through sub-symbolising supplementary spaces. Perhaps we can re-imagine the alchemical operation Separatio - Separation of the Elements – within reference to Matrixial pre-organisational form. It would involve questioning the frameworks with which we view the world. We might ask: where and how we draw boundaries, where and how we decide where one thing begins and another thing ends, what emerges at the boundaries between one thing and another, whether the boundaries are mutable. The process of abstracting and almost-abstracting elements not only produces symbols and sub-symbols it contributes to the fabric of the Symbolic itself.
I look to other artists who embrace this Matrixial ontology by weaving the spiritual, numinous and transcendent with the rational. Although the grid is usually associated with abstract and mathematical thinking and seen as being reflective of the logical order of the mind, yet the slight irregularities in Agnes Martin’s hand-drawn grids quietly destabilises its logic. Martin makes a place in which subtle feelings emerge in non-hierarchical relation to the grid, such that neither one nor the other dominates or incorporates the other. Lawrence Alloway sees the seamless surface of Martin’s grids signifying ‘for all its linear precision, an image dissolving:’ something ‘half-way between a rectangular system of coordinates and a veil’.[5] For Rosalind Krauss the grids ‘Mondrian and Malevich are not discussing canvas or pigment or graphite or any other form of matter. They are talking about Being or Mind or Spirit. From their point of view, the grid is a staircase to the Universal, and they are not interested in what happens below the concrete’.[6] Trancendental forces and spirituality inform the series of systematic grid-based drawings created by Swiss artist, scientist and healer, Emma Kunz. Hilma af Klint’s paintings, which sometimes resemble diagrams and formulae reference complex spiritual ideas.
In my paintings and in other elements, womb-like shapes connect with cosmic landscapes, reflecting transformations of the calendar year, pregnancy, birth and the maternal, and the co-emergence of life. Birds, horses, serpents, seahorses and strange, otherworldly creatures seem to fade into worlds beyond our own. Sometimes, web-like filaments hover around these symbols; liminal and interstitial spaces between psyche and landscape, self and other, human and non-human, material and spiritual. The paintings, following the alchemists, begin as unconscious projections onto the matter. Through gentle reflective processes some elements are brought to a state that hovers between unconscious and conscious awareness. As aspects become more conscious, I take those revelations into the spells and rituals. Their instructional form is particularly interesting to me and offers a way to work directly with the protocological in a fragilising and transformative way.
Sharing a Symbolic Life, 2023. Oil on Canvas 70cm x 70cm
I think of my artworks as nets of elements and partial elements; paintings, magic, alchemy, writing, rituals, recipes, fragile protocols, gardening, spells, shadow concepts, lists of instability. The elements do not necessarily exist in the same place or time as each other. Sometimes elements remain invisible and unheard; undocumented. Some lie dormant for years until called into (re)being. Sometimes, they emerge spontaneously and sometimes, they co-emerge telepathically. The elements are organised in non-hierarchical, non-centralised, non-linear relations with each other. I visualise these elements as interconnecting webs of knots and holes in diverse yarns. The fragile net form of my work both participates in, and attempts to resist, the distributed network form by adopting a strategy of and and and; protocol and fragilization; symbols and sub-symbols; geometry and healing.
[1] Carl Jung, Lecture XI, 11th July 1941
[2] Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 335-336.
[3] Bertell Ollman, Dance of the Dialectic, 61.
[4] See for example:
Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger. Matrix-Borderlines. Oxford: Museum of Modern Art, 1993.
Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger. “Copoiesis.” Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization 5, X (2005): 703-713, accessed June 6, 2009, www.ephemeraweb.org/journal/5- X/5-Xettinger.pdf.
[5] Lawrence Alloway, Agnes Martin, cited in Strickland, Minimalism: Origins, 94.
[6] Rosalind Krauss, “Grids.” Originality of the Avant-garde and Other Modernist Myths, 181.