Susan MacWilliam
'Contemporary art is overstocked with spooks. The well-scried realm of photography and the occult (to take only the most obvious example) is conjured too readily in works that evoke the spiritualist sessions of the mid-to-late nineteenth century'. 'It takes an artist of rare insight and stamina - not to say a more expansive understanding of what 'the occult' might signify - to stick with this stuff and draw more from it than a simply unsettling glimpse of the intimacy of science and superstition, art and pure quackery.'
S MacW 'has both the insight and the stamina: also, a more rigorous sense than most of the history of the field on which she enters patiently, delicately and with a keen eye for the absurdities of her subject. For several years, the Belfast-based artist has been making videos and installations that reanimate certain key episodes in the history of seances and mediumship. In The Last Person (1998) (see below right),
the artist posed as a medium, summoning the shade of Helen Duncan, the last person to be tried (in 1944) under the Witchcraft Act. In Kuda Bux (2003)(
see below left), she restages demonstrations by a New York mystic, in the 1930s and 1940s, of 'eyeless sight'. In her three -creen DVD installation Eileen (2008)(see above center), the aged daughter of the celebrated Irish medium Eileen J. Garrett recalls key episodes from her mother's life. Representing Northern Ireland at the Venice Biennale this year, MacW will show Flammarion, a film examining the manifestation of an ectoplasmic text ont he wall of a seance cabinet in Winnipeg in 1931. The word that appeared was 'Flammarion':the name of one time President of the Society for Psychical Research in London. MacW comes at this unconvincing episode via encounters with parapsychologists and descendants of those present, tracking the printed and photographic evidence for the event through archives and interviews. One of the uncanny effects of her approach is that she has at this atage insinuated herself quite some way into the occult community, become a trusted collaborator of its delusional members. She has begun to speak their language, and at the time of writing was busy constructing a seance cabinet in her studio.'
- Brian Dillon, Future Greats, Art Review, Issue 30, page 88.
'Contemporary art is overstocked with spooks. The well-scried realm of photography and the occult (to take only the most obvious example) is conjured too readily in works that evoke the spiritualist sessions of the mid-to-late nineteenth century'. 'It takes an artist of rare insight and stamina - not to say a more expansive understanding of what 'the occult' might signify - to stick with this stuff and draw more from it than a simply unsettling glimpse of the intimacy of science and superstition, art and pure quackery.'
S MacW 'has both the insight and the stamina: also, a more rigorous sense than most of the history of the field on which she enters patiently, delicately and with a keen eye for the absurdities of her subject. For several years, the Belfast-based artist has been making videos and installations that reanimate certain key episodes in the history of seances and mediumship. In The Last Person (1998) (see below right),
the artist posed as a medium, summoning the shade of Helen Duncan, the last person to be tried (in 1944) under the Witchcraft Act. In Kuda Bux (2003)(
see below left), she restages demonstrations by a New York mystic, in the 1930s and 1940s, of 'eyeless sight'. In her three -creen DVD installation Eileen (2008)(see above center), the aged daughter of the celebrated Irish medium Eileen J. Garrett recalls key episodes from her mother's life. Representing Northern Ireland at the Venice Biennale this year, MacW will show Flammarion, a film examining the manifestation of an ectoplasmic text ont he wall of a seance cabinet in Winnipeg in 1931. The word that appeared was 'Flammarion':the name of one time President of the Society for Psychical Research in London. MacW comes at this unconvincing episode via encounters with parapsychologists and descendants of those present, tracking the printed and photographic evidence for the event through archives and interviews. One of the uncanny effects of her approach is that she has at this atage insinuated herself quite some way into the occult community, become a trusted collaborator of its delusional members. She has begun to speak their language, and at the time of writing was busy constructing a seance cabinet in her studio.'- Brian Dillon, Future Greats, Art Review, Issue 30, page 88.
Yvonne
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