Inspired by the mystical works of Ithell Colquhoun (the subject of a major monographic exhibition at Tate Britain opening 13 June). The Night Side of Nature will present three major paintings by Colquhoun, Nativity (1929) Roman Sun (1947)and Kelp Gathering (1949), alongside contemporary artists Claire Kerr, Alice Maher, and Penny Slinger. . It will emphasise the continued relevance of Colquhoun’s vision in the context of today’s often fragmented and chaotic world.
The title, drawn from Colquhoun’s essay The Night Side of Nature, published in The Glass Magazine, 1953, evokes "cataclysmic theories of the beginning and the end of the world" offering a profound meditation on death, rebirth, and transformation. Colquhoun borrowed the title from Catherine Crowe’s book of the same name, first published in 1848. In her work, Crowe advocated for the serious investigation of hauntings, doppelgängers, presentiments, and other supernatural occurrences.
Ithell Colquhoun (1906–1988) was a British surrealist painter, writer, and occultist known for her vivid, dreamlike artworks that explored the unconscious mind and mystical themes. She was associated with the Surrealist movement and created both visual art and literary works, often blending symbolism, mythology, and the esoteric. Her personal exploration of mysticism and the occult also deeply influenced her creative output, making her a distinctive figure in both the art and spiritual realms. Her works have recently been exhibited at institutions including Tate Britain and Tate St. Ives’; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Musée Cantonal des Beaux Arts, Lausanne.
Claire Kerr (born 1968, Wallsend, UK) lives and works in Dublin, studied at Magdalen College Oxford, Wimbledon School of Art, London and Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Dublin. Her paintings, apparently seamless and resolved, in fact feel their tentative way - looking for that enigmatic space where an idea interacts with the tangible and real. Modest in scale, they invite intimacy with a viewer but leave open the question of meaning and interpretation. Concerned with the fundamental properties of a painted image – surface, depth, context – they celebrate the idiosyncratic or peculiar, trains of thought at a tangent, an unobtrusive weirdness. They give the impression of precision and fact but make ample use of the fictional and speculative. Her work has been the subject of a major monograph, published by r/e projects and is included in the recent publications Landscape and Environment in Contemporary Irish Art, Yvonne Scott ed., Churchill House Press in association with IMMA, 2023 and Irish Art 1920–2020 Perspectives on a Century of Change, Yvonne Scott Catherine Marshall eds., 2022.
The oblique, the ambiguous, the hard-to-define is a place of possibilities and of freedom – of hope, even - where meaning is not fixed but in a productive state of flux. The paintings embrace these possibilities and this freedom – taking as a starting point some of the Surrealist image-making methods used by Ithell Colquhoun - but also the wider vision developed in her later life at Lamorna Cove and at Paul in Cornwall: elements of chance juxtaposed with precision, the occult with the everyday, the surreal with the commonplace. Images and symbols are the starting point for different, even contradictory trains of thought, or else hover quietly, gleefully unexplained. (Claire Kerr, May 2025)
Alice Maher (born 1956, Co. Tipperary, Ireland) has produced some of the most iconic images in contemporary Irish art: sculpture, photography, film-drawings, installation, video, charcoal drawings, watercolours and prints. She is well known for her series of sculptures using natural materials, her drawings and installations using human hair, and photographic portraits of the artist using her own body and elements taken from the wild. Her work is embedded in cultural history, mythology, folklore, fairy tales and medieval history. The way she re-appropriates everyday objects, plays on confusion, and questions the memory and cultural associations of materials places her work in the lineage of Surrealism. Alice Maher's work is held in many public collections including British Museum, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Becoming, a retrospective exhibition, was held at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, in 2012-13. Alice Maher was awarded the 18th Drawing Prize, Daniel & Florence Guerlain Contemporary Art Foundation in March 2025.
Penny Slinger (born 1947, London), lives in Los Angeles. She studied at Chelsea School of Art. London, where Surrealism formed her primary artistic influence and where she developed her unique brand of ‘Feminist Surrealism’. Working primarily with different forms of collage, her work also spans film, photography and sculpture. In her radical and provocative practice, she explores the concept of the feminine subconscious and psyche, using her own body to examine the relationship between sexuality, mysticism and femininity, seeking, in her own words, "to bring the inside out and the outside in" and to create "a new language for the feminine psyche to express itself." Slinger's iconic book, An Exorcism: A Photo Romance, was published by Fulgur Press in 2024, an extension of the original An Exorcism which was published in 1977. Her work has been widely exhibited including at Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Hayward Gallery, London; Hamburger Kunsthalle; The Photographers’ Gallery, London; Tate Britain, London.
For the duration of The Night Side of Nature a display of the engraving blocks of Claire Leighton (1898–1989) will be exhibited in the lower gallery at Purdy Hicks, courtesy of Liss Llewellyn Leighton, a British-American artist whose work was deeply influenced by magic, surrealism, and mysticism, contributes to the exhibition’s exploration of transformation, the occult, and humanity’s relationship with the natural world.
RAW (Rediscovering Art by Women) passionately advocates for the recognition and respect owed to women artists past, present and future. Our ambition is to revise any stigma, marginalisation or oversight endured by women artists resulting from social climates and unjust discrimination.
RAW’s focus is both retrospective and prospective. Through our exclusive collection of over 70 works by women Surrealist artists, we strive to reposition these artists within the canon of art history through increased exposure and research. With initiatives such as the RAW Prize, we proactively support contemporary women artists who seek greater platforms and louder voices, with an emphasis on the LGBTQ+ community. Through a vibrant exhibition programme, a dedicated blog, events and more, RAW’s work is dedicated to equality and fairness in a world where there is still room for huge improvement. (RAW reg. charity 1205988)
