Not Without My Ghosts: Yorkshire's paranormal past the subject of a new exhibition in Sheffield

Not Without My Ghosts – The Artist as Medium, at the Millennium Gallery until the end of June, brings together works from the 19th century to the present day and looks at how artists have engaged with séances, channelling, automatic writing and other paranormal investigations. The work on display includes paintings, drawings, installations, video and animation from 25 international artists. The show comes to Sheffield direct from London in partnership with Hayward Gallery Touring and the Drawing Room gallery.

“It has been a long-standing project,” says Gillian Fox, assistant curator at Hayward Gallery Touring. “Our whole ethos is about creating exhibitions that tour around the UK. We worked with the Drawing Room and the three curators, Simon Grant, Lars Bang Larsen and Marco Pasi, who they had been talking to about a proposed show on spiritualism. During their research the curators found other connections which related to work by contemporary artists and then when we came on board to develop the idea further, we found other potential links.”

It is a huge subject to cover and there are several strands to the exhibition reflecting the many ways in which the creation of art can be a process of helping to make sense of a sometimes hard to understand world and of opening up and expanding the limits of human experience.

“The exhibition is only a snapshot of what it could have been because it is such a wide-ranging topic but obviously in any curatorial situation you have to make choices,” says Fox. “The curators we were working with all came to the subject matter with their own particular ideas and expertise. So, you get a very international perspective but there were always key figures we knew we wanted to include.”

Those figures include the well-known 19th century visionary artist and poet William Blake, alongside lesser-known Victorian so-called “spirit” artists, such as Georgiana Houghton and Barbara Honywood, whose work was based on their own experiences of communicating with the world of the spirits and their fascination with spiritualism which was very fashionable at the time.

Interestingly, the exhibition features a large proportion of work by women – 18 of the 25 artists represented – which illustrates not only how it seems to have been primarily women engaged with spirit art and the mediumistic but also how their creative endeavours have strong connections with the history of feminism over the last two centuries.

“Artists like Houghton and Honywood are being re-evaluated at the moment but women’s role in art 100 to 150 years ago was overshadowed. At that time in the UK, the art scene was dominated by the Pre-Raphaelites.” In that context, women were very much in a passive role, as muses and models for the male artists in the pre-Raphaelite “brotherhood”.

Those women, like Houghton and Honywood, who were making their own work were not taken seriously by the art establishment of the time. “Because they were channelling, the critics would say the work wasn’t theirs, it was nothing to do with their skill as artists,” says Fox.

“There was a lot of sexism rolled into it and we are still dealing with some of those stereotypes today.”

The show also looks at the work of the Surrealists, a cultural movement that developed in Europe in the immediate aftermath of the First World War – major figures included Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte and Max Ernst – and their experiments with automatism, a technique in which the artist would allow the unconscious mind to take over and express itself in their work.

Examples in the show include 20th century artists such as Austin Osman Spare and Ithell Colquhoun who combined techniques drawn from automatism with an interest in the occult.

“It is a really gorgeous show and it is very arresting visually, very colourful and it explores all these interesting questions,” says Fox. “The Victorian era is the historical entry point to the exhibition and then it moves into contemporary practice and all these artists who are looking at the idea of channelling and connections with something outside themselves and themes looking extensively at the creative process.”

The contemporary artists represented in the exhibition include Emma Talbot, winner of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women 2019-2021, whose work How is Your Own Death So Inconceivable?, an acrylic on silk, is the largest piece in the show.

“Talbot was a very different kind of artist in the first part of her career and then after suffering a bereavement, she changed direction in her work,” says Fox. “A hundred years ago some of the artists were also dealing with things that took them in another direction in moments of tragedy. There was the First World War and then the flu epidemic and many artists were trying to readdress their lives around that. Often people turned to spiritualism as a way of trying to explain or come to terms with what had happened.”

Talbot’s work and pieces by other contemporary artists such as Suzanne Treister, Lea Porsager and Louise Despont all show how the power of the unseen and unexplained continues to feed into creativity and facilitate an exploration of the many ambiguities, difficulties and contradictions of the modern world.

The exhibition is certainly a thought-provoking one which encourages viewers to consider profound questions around mortality, creativity, spirituality and community and the way in which art can help to make the unbearable bearable. Fox hopes the show will be the beginning of a journey for those who come and see it.

“I hope that people will engage with these beautiful artworks and the interesting themes explored in the exhibition and that it might encourage some people to learn more about the subject and reflect on the struggles we were facing 100 years ago – it is an ongoing conversation,” she says. “We are living through tumultuous times again at the moment and I think this is a show that demonstrates how people have dealt with that in the past, so in that sense it feels very timely too.”

Not Without My Ghosts – The Artist as Medium runs at the Millennium Gallery in Sheffiel