Talk: On The Magical Writings of Ithell Colquhoun - Camden Art Centre
Type
Events
Format
In the Building
Date 19 Feb 2026
19:00-20:30
Price £5/6

Sift through the pioneering artist's magical writings and their contemporary resonances.

Writer, artist, and wilfully dissident surrealist Ithell Colquhoun (1906–1988) invested her unique works with magical learning, esoteric lore, and a palpable sense of mystery. Despite having published widely on occult topics during her lifetime, Colquhoun was never to produce a single book-length edition of her magical writings. As a result, many of her essays were lost or neglected.

Join folklorist and anthropologist Dr Amy Hale and writer and publisher Jamie Sutcliffe as they discuss the multi-dimensional character of Colquhoun’s writing in anticipation of A Walking Flame: Selected Magical Writings of Ithell Colquhoun, due to be published by Strange Attractor Press later this year.

Hale and Sutcliffe will sift through Colquhoun’s remarkable body of magical texts, discussing their ongoing resonances with contemporary art writing — from exercises in obsession to diagrammatic speculation — while considering the increasingly spiritual nature of contemporary art, technology, and politics.

Lead image: Ithell Colquhoun, Snakes Around Avebury, early 1960s.

The speakers

The speakers

Dr Amy Hale is an Atlanta based writer and critic. She has written widely on Ithell Colquhoun and served as academic advisor to the 2025 Colquhoun retrospective at Tate St. Ives and Tate Britain. She wrote the first scholarly biography of Colquhoun, Ithell Colquhoun: Genius of the Fern Loved Gully (Strange Attractor, 2020) followed by Sex Magic: Diagrams of Love, (Tate Publishing, 2024) and was the editor of Essays on Women in Western Esotericism: Beyond Seeresses and Sea Priestesses (Palgrave 2022). Scholarly and critical essays have been published by Tate, Burlington Contemporary, Art UK, The Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Correspondences Journal and others. Beyond the Supernatural: Magic in Contemporary Art is due to be published with Tate Publishing in 2026. She is an Honorary Research Fellow with Falmouth University.

Jamie Sutcliffe is a writer, curator, and co-director of Strange Attractor Press. He is the editor of the books Documents of Contemporary Art: Magic, published by The Whitechapel Gallery and The MIT Press (2021), and Weeb Theory published by Banner Repeater (2023). His essays, reviews, and interviews have been published internationally by Art Monthly, Art Review, e-flux Criticism, Frieze, The White Review, Rhizome, The Quietus, and Bricks From The Kiln. He is Associate Lecturer at Chelsea College of Art, and the University of Northampton, and is currently writing a book on the cybernetic afterlives of Osamu Tezuka for Breakdown Press.