Tranceducers: Art of Visionaries, Mediums and Automatists

Great Pulteney Street Gallery, Soho      29.7.25 to 10.8.25
 

Curator: Vivienne Roberts ~ vivienne@vivienneroberts.com

'Tranceducers: Art of Visionaries, Mediums and Automatists is an exhibition that explores artistic practices shaped by alternative perceptions, otherworldly transmissions and intuitive mark-making. Featuring both historical pioneers and contemporary practitioners from around the world, the show promises to be a mesmerising experience.

In mediumistic art, works are often believed to be repositories of hidden wisdom, or to carry messages from other worlds. Automatist artists relinquish full conscious control, allowing themselves to become a conduit for unseen forces, connecting the macrocosm and microcosm with echoes of alchemical and esoteric cosmologies. Visionary artists, meanwhile, offer radically different ways of seeing the universe, revealing dimensions we may have sensed but never fully perceived. Together, the twenty four artists in Tranceducers have encompassed these ideas and created artworks that occupy an enigmatic and liminal space between the material and the marvellous.

The exhibition includes historically important artists like Georgiana Houghton, whose mediumistic watercolours are rarely seen, as well as little known artists like Aleksandra Ionowa whose drawings are attuned to the invisible energies of the natural world. The show features art that has the ability to mesmerise its beholder, such as the swirling vortices of this year’s Turner Prize nominee, Nnena Kalu, the kaleidoscopic cosmogrammes of Louise Janin, the meditative mandalas of Victor Bramley and the rhythmic forms of Madge Gill.

A prominent theme of the exhibition is the concept of the mantic stain, a term used by artist and occultist Ithell Colquhoun, whose work is represented in the show. The phrase refers to marks made through chance-driven techniques such as decalcomania, fumage, stillomancy, parsemage, and ecremage. Rather than being intentionally depicted, forms emerge as revelations from the unconscious. Championed by the Surrealists, but with roots in mediumistic practice, these artworks function as instruments of visual alchemy and divination, transcending the raw materials from which they are created into forms of mysterious wonders.

Spanning over 170 years, Tranceducers, proposes that the often overlooked visionary, the medium and the automatist are not peripheral to art history, but enduring figures whose insights can challenge, disrupt, heal and reawaken our enchantment with the world we now live in. This is an exhibition where the viewer plays a vital role, invited not merely to look, but to see beyond the surface. The works on display do not simply depict, they tranceduce, offering portals into alternative modes of perception and deeper realities'.