Stronger are the works of the three pho­tog­ra­phers, each pro­vid­ing per­for­mances; com­mu­nion and rit­ual with un­seen forces, cap­tured by cam­era and then al­tered by pho­tog­ra­phy’s own al­chem­i­cal magic.

Mary Mac­Gre­gor-Reid’s work is in­spired by ab­stract tarot cards made by Colquhoun, which have re­mark­able swirling colour and galac­tic star­bursts. A dancer in sparkling ivories and greys per­forms in a rev­elry be­fore a stu­dio back­drop of green and pur­ple that re­sem­bles the aurora (long as­so­ci­ated with the se­cret oc­cult so­ci­ety of the Golden Dawn). There’s rich lay­ered cos­tum­ing of furs and fab­ric, with scarves caught float­ing vo­lu­mi­nously in the air like spir­i­tual hosts. The woman is in con­trol, echo­ing the poses of em­pow­ered fe­male fig­ures across re­li­gious icono­gra­phies.

Mary Mac­Gre­gor-Reid’s work is in­spired by ab­stract tarot cards made by Colquhoun, which have re­mark­able swirling colour and galac­tic star­bursts. A dancer in sparkling ivories and greys per­forms in a rev­elry be­fore a stu­dio back­drop of green and pur­ple that re­sem­bles the aurora (long as­so­ci­ated with the se­cret oc­cult so­ci­ety of the Golden Dawn). There’s rich lay­ered cos­tum­ing of furs and fab­ric, with scarves caught float­ing vo­lu­mi­nously in the air like spir­i­tual hosts. The woman is in con­trol, echo­ing the poses of em­pow­ered fe­male fig­ures across re­li­gious icono­gra­phies.

A Colquhoun paint­ing that de­picts sub­merged Ne­olithic stand­ing stones in Brit­tany is the in­spi­ra­tion for Hay­ley They­ers’ work. They’re set in a sur­real un­der­wa­ter world, al­lud­ing to en­vi­ron­men­tal degra­da­tion and a dis­eased kauri for­est on the Manukau Har­bour. In Colos­sus, kauri with leaves and, per­haps kelp, is sus­pended, golden like gum, in ice. Melt­ing men­hirs, they are rich in mys­te­ri­ous tex­tures as if they might in the next mo­ment come bird-like mag­i­cally alive. In other works, a fig­ure strug­gles un­der wa­ter, with the brack­ish glow of leach from the for­est. I’m re­minded of Chris­tine Web­ster’s pho­tog­ra­phy.

Kate Ram­pling’s del­i­cate black-and-white pho­tog­ra­phy of fig­ures in land­scape en­gages with sur­re­al­ist au­toma­tism tech­niques, with stone and fire meet­ing on the sur­face of her neg­a­tives. Else­where, sim­ple ma­te­ri­als el­e­gantly twist into charged yet enig­matic sym­bols, as if by spells.

When and where Com­mu­ni­cat­ing Ves­sels; Pho­to­space; un­til June 26.

Right, work by Mary Mac­Gre­gor-Reid, from Com­mu­ni­cat­ing Ves­sels, now on at Pho­to­space Gallery; left, Hay­ley They­ers’ work is in­spired by an Ithell Colquhoun paint­ing that de­picts sub­merged Ne­olithic stand­ing stones in Bri­tanny.

Mary’s own connection with Ithell turns out to be somewhat personal. As a teenager she found herself drawn to the occult, reading up on all manner of esoteric topics. When her father discovered this passion, he revealed some family information that his daughter had previously been unaware of: both her grandfather and greatgrandfather were part of the ancient order of Druids in England. Mary has been researching their history ever since.

“My grandfather is this really weird character; he’s so eccentric and hard to pin down,” she says. “He made all these insane claims, like that he travelled through Tibet as a monk and he’d been a ship’s doctor in the Antarctic — all sorts of crazy stuff.

“I found these other interesting people in the UK who were researching him as well, and we discovered that quite a few of these wild claims he made sound like they could actually be true.”

Grandfather George Watson MacGregor Reid was particularly notable in these circles, being a member of Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn secret society and an acquaintance of Aleister Crowley, perhaps the 20th century’s most famous (or infamous) occultist. The photographer’s research eventually brought her to England,where she was granted access to The Warburg Institute, associated with the University of London. It is a unique library dedicated to the intersection of art, science, and history with mysticism, superstition, and magic. There she was able to peruse many original manuscripts held by occultists of the past, including correspondence penned by her grandfather. It was there she also discovered the forgotten legacy of Ithell Colquhoun.

COMMUNING WITH THE PAST

Each photographer in the Communicating Vessels show engaged with a particular element of Ithell’s practice or history; the aspect that fascinated Mary was colour. This was the same element that fascinated Ithell when she made her taro deck, accompanied by the essay Taro as Colour in 1978. In it, she explains that, rather than fortune telling, her cards are intended to be used as a tool for spiritual contemplation, to access a higher plane of awareness.

“There’s nothing figurative in them; they are purely abstract,” Mary says. “The more you look at them, the more amazing they are. I chose three that I really liked and worked with those.”

Mary’s works are often intensely saturated, with a subject’s clothing and background comprising subtle shades of a single colour. Her Nigredo series explored ubiquitous black, the Rubedo works engage with alarming red, while pure white was the focus of the Albedo series. For Communicating Vessels, the photographer pulled hues of blue from the taro cards.

“I selected colour values from the paintings I was working with from her [Ithell],” Mary says. “I used these big flat LED panels of lights and I was able to put those values into the lights to try and replicate the colours she was using.

“I shot on cyclorama and kept my models quite far forward, so I could flood the back of the cyclorama and floor with light.”

The lighting set-up allowed the photographer to reproduce the shades and lines of the abstract taro cards in the context of her own constructed portraiture. Equally important to the effect is the costuming, made of fabrics and textures that reference the structure of the impressionist taro cards in fabric form.

“I make all of my costumes — that’s part of the process for me,” she says. “I feel I am dressing the characters who are going into the work. The meditation of making them is part of it as well.”

While she has no formal training in costume making, Mary’s background in Auckland’s goth music clubs and contemporary dance have given her plenty of experience in the craft. Her subjects are typically friends who volunteer for projects, masked almost completely by the covering garments.

“I’ve hardly worked with professional models, but when I have I find they are almost too focused; they’re not relaxed enough,” the photographer explains.

“Whereas with my friends I can just say ‘Stand there’ and they will literally just stand there, which is perfect. I’ll come over and move their hand and they’ll just stay there; they don’t feel the need to pose. I love these natural stances. I do put them in strange positions, but at the same time they have this really relaxed, normal look.”

BEST-LAID PLANS

For Communicating Vessels, Mary had to tweak her usual process due to the first, sudden Covid-19 lockdown earlier this year. A friend had originally been drafted for the shoot, but the incoming restrictions didn’t allow for anyone outside of the photographer’s bubble to be in the studio. The way forward was clear; Mary would have to step in front of the lens herself.

After dialling in the settings, she left her husband to trigger the camera as she donned her elaborate costume and began to throw the floating fabric into the air, with hopes of conjuring the sort of shapes Ithell’s cards brought to mind — no photoshopping here.

“I was so unsure about it, but I really liked the results and I’d do it again,” she says. “There’s a bodily feeling I want to get out of each of the shots, and, because I know what that is, I’m able to express it in front of the camera.”

The oceanic blue-greens of the backdrop, shifting subtlety of the slate outfit, and billowing shapes of fabric make for a startling mirror of Ithell’s meditative cards. Just as the cards were designed for spiritual contemplation, Mary’s works invite the viewer into a scene of omnipresent colour, encouraging calm observation and lingering thought.

“I feel like it’s an antidote to our modern lives a bit. We’re bombarded constantly with information, and we never take time to stop and look inside ourselves and just experience a moment. So I feel like it’s an antidote to that. Making it is an antidote for me,” she explains.

Readers of fairy tales will be familiar with the idea that no magic spell or talisman works literally in the way that it is expected to. Their promises are trickier than that, keeping an essence of the intention while deftly sidestepping expectation. Immortality here is representational, difficult to verify, and yet mysteriously implied. The search for the perfection of eternal youth is paradoxically an acknowledgement (and rejection) of the fleetingness of life.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,

Science at its very beginning was intertwined with magic: “The magician, probing nature’s secrets, served as the template for the scientist.” (Gleick, 2003, p. 104). Alchemists would conjure and discover in equal measures.

The alchemists believed in the interconnectedness of life. Everything was related to everything else in some small way: Matter differed externally only through varying combinations of the four elements: earth, water, air and fire. Therefore, by alchemically manipulating those elements, any kind of matter could be transmuted into another. The conjunction of all elements would produce the philosopher’s stone. (Parry, 2011, p. 9) 

Accordingly, all metals were related to all other metals. By this reasoning, if one could only discover the method, the transmutation of base metals into gold must certainly be possible.

John Dee (1527 – 1608) was an advisor to Queen Elizabeth I. They lived in an era where belief in angels and demons was universal, and magic was indistinguishable from science. Elizabeth’s position on the throne was a precarious one in the wake of the reign of her Catholic sister Mary, but had been predicted by Dee through astrology. Elizabeth encouraged Dee’s research, particularly his investigation into the Philosopher’s Stone, as the prolonged life and riches it promised would surely secure her station. 

Dee amassed a great library of 4,000 books, and through his research came to believe in a hierarchy of metals with lead at one end, and gold at the other extremity. These metals could be understood as varying combinations of mercury (quicksilver) or sulphur (brimstone). “The elixir would rebalance those principles to purify imperfect metals into gold, remedying Nature’s defects through a process imitating its own creative force” (Parry, 2011, p. 43). Dee’s studies found no conflict between the scientific enquiry of maths and astronomy and the more esoteric investigation into the angelic language of creation, which he believed would bring unity to human kind. 

Similarly, Isaac Newton (1642 – 1727) followed both rational and arcane lines of thinking. Newton is better known for his work in the areas of mathematics, physics, calculus and optics, but he was also a keen alchemist: “… alchemy offered Newton, an earnest and devout seeker of truth, a comprehensive philosophy of nature and a unified theory of the universe” (Marshall, 2001, p. 402). Alchemy allowed for religion and science to go hand in hand, it was expected that an investigation into nature would uncover traces of God. 

To the modern mind these subjects may seem more difficult to reconcile, but to the alchemists, it was clear. What propelled their education was not so much a search for a solid and singular answer, but a passion for life in all its seething glory “To alchemists nature was alive with process. Matter was active, not passive; vital, not inert” (Gleick, 2003, p. 101), life contained movement, and all nature contained life.

The fatal flaw in the theory of the Philosopher’s Stone was that its two proposed outcomes were both regressive or backwardly inclined: attempts to either create gold or discover eternal youth are, at heart, attempts to reverse the order of nature. Both products require a return to something that is already gone, something that cannot be gained by building, only by stripping away. Gold is not a composite. It can be a component of a composite, but cannot be created where it did not exist to begin with. Similarly, eternal youth requires the regaining of a type of purity lost to age. 

These dual quests required distillation rather than creation, a metaphorical return to Eden.

So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

What doesn’t make sense is that seekers of the Philosopher’s Stone held up gold as the epitome of perfection, and yet expected that it was possible to make it out of baser things. Likewise it could be seen as nonsensical to expect to reach enlightenment with only a base human to work with.
How could enlightenment be linked to youth when wisdom comes with age? 

The ambiguity surrounding the nature of the Stone itself suggests that actually the Stone was of far greater value than the gold it purported to create: after all gold was already known, the Philosopher’s Stone was a mystery. No one knows for sure if the Stone was meant to be a magical amulet or a glorified recipe, and maybe that was because it was neither. Perhaps the Philosopher’s Stone was a symbolic quest, an allegory, intangible and mysterious because it truly only represented the accumulation of wisdom. Perfection is knowledge.

Where science and mysticism diverge is while scientists ultimately must prove or disprove their hypotheses; mystics find greater value in the thought and the search beyond the desire to finitely explain outcomes: Curiosity without cynicism.

On a sheet of paper Newton wrote: “To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age. Tis much better to do a little with certainty & leave the rest for others that come after you”(Newton as cited in Gluick, 2003, p. 190). 

The great irony is, of course, that if the Philosopher’s Stone is a metaphor, then these alchemists, scientists, obtained it without even knowing: gaining and contributing knowledge (gold) and becoming renowned (immortal) in the process. 

References

Brown, J. C. (1913). A history of chemistry: From the earliest times till the present day. London, England: J. & A. Churchill.

Frost, R. (1923). Nothing gold can stay [poem].

Gleick, J. (2003). Isaac Newton. New York, NY: Vintage Books.

Marshall, P. (2001). The philosopher’s stone: A quest for the secrets of alchemy. London, England: MacMillan.

Parry, G. (2011). The arch-conjurer of England: John Dee. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.