It's not so long ago that a woman's expressed interest in other realms would have ruined her
reputation or even killed her. And yet spiritualism in various incarnations has influenced
numerous men - including lauded modernist artists such as Wassily Kandinsky Piet Mondrian
Kazimir Malevich and Paul Klee - without repercussion. The fact that so many radical women
artists of their generation - and earlier - also drank deeply from the same spiritual well has
for too long been sorely neglected. In THE OTHER SIDE we explore the lives and work of a group
of extraordinary women from the twelfth-century mystic composer and artist Hildegard of
Bingen to the nineteenth-century English spiritualist Georgiana Houghton whose paintings swirl
like a cosmic Jackson Pollock the early twentieth-century Swedish artist Hilma af Klint who
painted with the help of her spirit guides and whose recent exhibition at New York's Guggenheim
broke all attendance records the 'Desert Transcendentalist' Agnes Pelton who painted her
visions beneath the vast skies of California the Swiss healer Emma Kunz who used geometric
drawings to treat her patients and the British surrealist and occultist Ithell Colquhoun
whose estate of more than 5 000 works recently entered the Tate gallery collection. While the
individual work of these artists is unique the women loosely shared the same goal: to
communicate with and learn from other dimensions.Weaving in and out of these myriad lives
sharing her own memories of otherworldly experiences Jennifer Higgie discusses the solace of
ritual the gender exclusions of art history the contemporary relevance of myth the boom in
alternative ways of understanding the world and the impact of spiritualism on feminism and
contemporary art. A radical reappraisal of a marginalised group of artists THE OTHER SIDE is
an intoxicating blend of memoir biography and art history.
