Helen Chadwick was obsessed with the restless, fleeting vestiges of things and feelings that had vanished—what she called “fugitive traces.” Her huge breadth of multimedia installations bloomed out of the effort to examine the ephemera of life. “Chadwick is capturing the fugitive not in a spirit of grief or censure, but in celebration,” her friend Marina Warner wrote in a 1989 essay. Chadwick is now the subject of the largest-ever retrospective of her career, at the Hepworth Wakefield gallery in West Yorkshire, and a new biography edited by Laura Smith; her legacy continues to evolve in conversation with our current discourse on femininity.

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“I genuinely don’t think contemporary art in Britain would look the same without her,” Smith told me. “The boldness with which she used her own body as a material, and used humor, was really revolutionary.” Her diverse works, from furry sculptures to photographs dunked in the sea to piles of decaying food, are hugely ambitious in their scope. It feels as if there are endless layers of meaning to peel back as she walks a blurry line between the beautiful and the grotesque.

Chadwick (1953–96) was born in Croydon, South London, into a working-class, mixed-heritage family. She studied at Brighton Polytechnic and the Chelsea College of Art in the 1970s before settling into a studio practice in Hackney, where she was a founding resident of the prolifically creative squatting community at Beck Road. Although her work would incorporate many materials (from urine to brains), she was trained as a photographer and continued to rely on the tool of the photographic image throughout her career.

Her early work In the Kitchen (1977) was recently included in the pioneering Tate Britain exhibition “Women in Revolt!” (2024). A performance in which Chadwick and three other women occupied costumes-cum-sculptures of kitchen appliances, now recorded in photographs, it was “a key moment in British feminist art practice,” according to the exhibition’s catalog. Still, Chadwick regularly was disparaged by both feminists and their critics for using her own conventionally beautiful body in her work, a criticism that shadowed her throughout her career.

Her key large-scale installations, like Ego Geometria Sum (1983) and The Oval Court (1986), are a dizzying blend of micro and macro views of human life, so layered and conceptual that they’re almost impossible to describe, but I’ll try. Ego Geometria Sum is a series of 10 plywood sculptures with photographs printed on their surfaces, encapsulating Chadwick’s whole life in geometric form. She described it as “a narrative of material objects, equivalents for selfhood, within a bounded safe place.” Each sculpture matches the volume of her body at different ages, beginning with a small rectangular prism representing an infant incubator and growing to her adult size.

The Oval Court is even more complex, made up of a series of blue-toned photocopied images of the artist’s naked body among various flora and fauna, arranged to form a sort of pool in the center of the room it occupies, topped by five golden spheres. On the walls are images inspired by the baldacchino in St. Peter’s Basilica, Venetian mirrors, and photocopied images of the artist weeping.

Both of these works utilize cheap materials to make vast statements about the mutability of self, the history of Western art, and the universality of life. They can be read in minute detail—Smith tells me that the hand gestures in The Oval Court are all drawn from specific Greek and Roman mythological references—but they also have a universal beauty and the fundamental magnetism of a self-portrait. By using the specificity of her own body and biography to reflect on these huge themes, Chadwick seems to be holding her arms out wide and attempting to enfold the world in her embrace. Her selfhood becomes the vector through which we see the universe.

By the late 1980s, Chadwick had vowed to stop using images of her body in her art, leading her toward works like Piss Flowers (1991–92),a group of white sculptures that are the results of the marks made by Chadwick and her husband, David Notarius, urinating on mounds of snow. They poured plaster into the holes bored by their urine, freezing them into strange landscapes. Works like this are still about the physicality of bodies but no longer depicting them. Even works like Cacao (1994), which opens the Hepworth exhibition, are about the body: A huge, real chocolate fountain, bubbling away like a fairy-tale cauldron, it filled me with desire and disgust simultaneously. (My mouth literally watered, but after a few moments I felt nauseous.) “The point of her work is that it makes you feel weird,” Smith said.

As teacher at various art schools in Britain, including Goldsmiths, Central Saint Martins, and the Royal College of Art, Chadwick had a significant influence on the generation of artists that followed her. The group that became known as the Young British Artists (YBAs) trace her impact, particularly artists Sarah Lucas and Anya Gallaccio. Their play with gender, decay, unexpected materials, and multimedia installations is indebted to Chadwick’s legacy. In 1987 Chadwick became one of the first women to be nominated for the prestigious Turner Prize, an early recognition of her exceptionally original work.

Chadwick died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 42 in 1996. One notice of her death in the Observer described her as “the most eminent woman artist of her generation”—both a high compliment and an annoyingly gendered one. But since her death, her name and work have become almost obscure, the price of being struck down in the midst of life and perhaps the consequence of the complexity of her work. “It might be said that she was an artist slightly out of her time,” wrote Stephen Walker in his 2013 book about Chadwick. One might also say that she was an artist out of time; her career lasted only 16 years, and there is a sense of unresolved business about her oeuvre.

Chadwick was a theoretical artist: Research led her in competing directions, which she tried to negotiate and reconcile in a way that was incredibly fruitful but also incomplete at the time of her death. “But our experience of her work is not theoretical,” says Ceri Lewis, curator of Tate Modern’s display “Artist Rooms: Helen Chadwick,” which travels to the National Galleries of Scotland in July. “It’s an embodied experience, engaging all our senses.”

Not all critics have been so kind. Tom Morton wrote a scathing review of the last retrospective of Chadwick’s work, at the Barbican Centre in London in 2004. “Chadwick’s work is, at best, a vivid souvenir of an art world long gone, and at worst a vaguely hysterical irrelevance,” he wrote in Frieze magazine. I quote this for two reasons: First, the remarkably sexist language is a reminder that feminist art is still not taken seriously—calling anything hysterical is a dog whistle for misogyny. Second, it points to the ways that Chadwick’s legacy is contested. There is a risk in novelty, which is that it becomes trite as soon as it has been done. But forgetting Chadwick’s perilous originality prevents us from recognizing the profundity of her work. “Her exploration of a more complex, fluid identity feels very current,” says Lewis.

The final work in the Hepworth exhibition is Carcass (1986), a rectangular plexiglass column filled with decaying food. It forms a sort of life cycle, with fresh-looking vegetables on top and compost that has almost become blackened soil on the bottom. Upon closer inspection, one sees that the piece is full of life: Bubbles rise up through the moisture that has gathered in the lower half as the rapid process of decay causes an effervescent fermentation. It is disgusting, but also hypnotic and remarkably beautiful. That perfect cocktail of pleasure and revulsion was Chadwick’s lifelong aim, and her bold pursuit of it continues to generate confronting, propulsive questions for viewers and artists alike.

“Metaphors are necessary for change,” said Bint Mbareh, who animates her work with the metaphor of waves: waves of water, waves of sound. She grew up in Ramallah, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, and her sound art and installations engage layered meanings of water for Palestinians, as a material that is both violent and sacred.

As a student at Goldsmiths in London, Bint Mbareh (a stage name, assumed when the artist first started making sound work around 2019) studied Palestinian rain-summoning songs. They weren’t songs she knew, because they are very geographically specific and, as is the case for so many Palestinians, displacement figures on both sides of her family. “What that meant for me was that I would never sing with a grandmother in an organic way, the way that music is passed down,” she explained.

Bint Mbareh took up the challenge of learning the songs herself, but she doesn’t sing them as they were sung in the past. In works like Time Flows in All Directions: Water Flows Through Me, first performed in 2020, she twists and destabilizes them, using digital technology while singing live to loop, layer, and remix the sounds of her voice and different instruments. The instability prevents listeners from getting too comfortable, paralleling the tumult of Palestine’s own environment.

From her home base in London, Bint Mbareh started using the medium of what she conceptually calls a “choir”—a gathering of peers, collaborators, and friends who give collective voice to their grief in the aftermath of October 7, 2023. “It’s a medium that’s literally breaking the borders between our bodies,” she said. Last summer, she was invited to perform with one iteration of her choir at an Artists for Aid benefit concert in London organized by the musician Mustafa the Poet, along with Clairo, FKA twigs, and Blood Orange. She presented another choir-based interactive performance at Tate Modern last fall as part of a conference titled “Waterways: Arteries, rhythms and kinship.”

Since October 7, her work has taken on more physical forms beyond the realm of performance. Installation works like Bodies of Knowledge (shown last year at the Royal College of Art) and What’s Left? (in this year’s Sharjah Biennial) incorporate sounds as well as water in tanks that vibrate from the sound. In What’s Left?, Bint Mbareh added a tiny toy car and marbles to the tanks, evoking an eerie sense of childhood.

Despite her subject matter, there’s often an almost jarring element of humor and lightness in her work. “I feel like it is a huge privilege to be able to make art that is political,” she said, “but so much needs to be made fun of.” As for her name, “bint mbareh” is “something your mother-in-law would say to you,” she explained, with a laugh. “It means like when you say someone was ‘born yesterday.’”

With her complex blend of levity and depth, Bint Mbareh holds humor in one hand and the high stakes of survival in the other—all to explore what she calls “the most literal ways that sound can be resistance.” 

Read more profiles from the 2025 “New Talent” issue.

 With the swipe of a huge brush, Jen DeLuna blurs her paintings before they can dry, freezing the image in a hazy moment. She describes the effect: “It’s like that feeling of memory fading, like something you can barely grasp.” Indeed, the works have a powerful feeling of uneasiness about them. Based on vintage found photographs, their combination of movement and stillness is inherently painterly.

“I would consider myself, first and foremost, a portrait painter,” she says, but DeLuna doesn’t know the identity of any of the women she paints. Many of the photographs she has used lately are images of ’70s pin-up girls, as in works like Rallying Sigh (2024). She zooms in on their faces or cropped parts of their bodies, removing them from any context but leaving the viewer with a strange sense of their commodified origins. “I like to be respectful to whoever this person is,” she tells me, which is part of why she calls her works “portraits,” despite their anonymity. Carefully painting someone’s face is “like falling in love,” she says, smiling at the cheesiness of her own remark.

I visited DeLuna’s studio while she was in residence at PLOP in East London. A massive painting of a slobbery, fanged, gaping dog’s mouth greeted me as I walked in. “This is the largest painting I’ve worked on, ever,” DeLuna told me. Going from a home studio in Boston to her own space for the first time has opened up new levels of scale. “I don’t think I realized how limiting my space was.”

The dog mouths are a new avenue for DeLuna. Like her portraits of women, they are blurred before highlights are added, giving a paradoxical finish that is both unstable and glossy. But the dogs are confrontational: They can be hard to look at for too long, their frozen ferocity leaping off the canvas. When I ask her about works like Hounding (2024), DeLuna talks about how dogs are associated with servitude and domesticity, but the underlying aggression of their animal nature never goes away. She always hangs them alongside her portraits of women. “There is a dialogue between them,” she says, “without being too prescriptive or too explanatory.”

DeLuna’s practice is refreshingly formalist and intuitive. She justifies certain decisions by deciding simply whether she wants, or doesn’t want, to do something. Others have called her work “glamorous” or “violent,” comparing it to fashion photography, Gerhard Richter’s work, and plenty more. She finds describing it herself much harder. “To imbue so much meaning into my work feels so decadent,” she said. She had never seen Richter’s blurred photo works, or painters with styles like hers, before developing her own practice as a BFA student at Carnegie Mellon University. Now, she says, all she sees online is work that looks like hers, because “that’s how the algorithm works.”

On their own, DeLuna’s renderings of women and of dogs are striking: Her method of painting creates a magnetic final product that invites prolonged looking. But hung together, the works are staggering. They force us to confront the violence inherent in the way we look at women, a menagerie of eyes and mouths evoking carnality in jarringly different registers. 

Read more profiles from the 2025 “New Talent” issue.

“I never want to look ordinary,” Leigh Bowery told i-D magazine in 1985. Tate Modern’s new exhibition on his life and work proves that he succeeded—and then some. A gay icon in 1980s and ’90s London club culture, Bowery was a fashion designer, performance artist, and total original from the start. The show follows him from his arrival in London from Australia at the age of 19 through the inception of his infamous club Taboo, his establishment as an avant-garde fashion visionary, and his rise to greater fame and eventual exploration of graphic varieties of performance art. As the exhibition progresses, it grows darker, following Bowery’s path to body horror and the grotesque. A good portion of the work on view is not by Bowery but, instead, depicts him in his role as a muse (to use a loaded but apt term) among fellow club-goers and other artists ranging from underground figures to Lucian Freud.

“You wouldn’t be interested in me if I didn’t look the way I do,” Bowery once said. “Let’s face it, nobody would.” It’s a line that gets to the heart of his own fraught sense of self-worth, as well as the way he judged others. The first few rooms in the exhibition focus on Taboo, which—during its 1985–86 run before being closed down by a police drug raid—was known for its embrace of sexual freedom and creative risk. Frequented by the likes of Boy George, George Michael, and John Galliano, it was also famous for turning away anyone who was not suitably outrageous in terms of style and comportment. Bowery was ruthless in crafting the world he wanted both inside and outside the club, ensuring that he was surrounded by people who matched (or at least respected) his commitment to pushing boundaries. Tate’s gallery walls are papered with snapshots and Polaroids from Taboo, evoking the grimy authentic abundance of its hedonism.

Bowery’s fashion designs, which he made for himself for clubbing and then eventually also for dancers in ballets by choreographer Michael Clark, are absolutely wild. Between the garments on display in the galleries and the many photos and videos of them in action, we get a comprehensive sense of his outlandish design sensibility. Many outfits have bulbous silhouettes reminiscent of Marie Antoinette, while others feature balaclavas. Still others include ballerina skirts that leave their wearers’ asses bare. Bowery was also obsessed with polka dots, which he connected to signs of illness: zits, herpes sores, and other varieties of pox that he sometimes circled on his face when they were naturally occurring or drew on when they were not.

There are elements of Bowery that are particularly challenging to viewers and curators in 2025. For example, one wall text notes that Bowery performed in blackface and as a Nazi, wearing swastikas, in the 1990s. Neither is pictured anywhere in the exhibition, but the text calls such gestures “offensive.” There are also images of live performances in which Bowery sprayed the audience with enema fluid from his anus, which was just one of several fluids he produced on stage. Shock value was one of his main objectives.

The second half of the exhibition focuses mostly on Bowery’s performance art, which grew more extreme as he neared the end of his life in 1996. His most iconic performance, presented many times, was his “Birth” act, in which he gave birth onstage to his collaborator, Nicola Rainbird, who would become his wife. She began the performance strapped to his chest upside down, then emerged in a bloody show, both of them screaming and covered in stage blood. Bowery also incorporated body horror into other performances, including safety-pinning his mouth, cutting himself with glass, and harming himself in various other ways.

The philosophically transgressive nature of Bowery’s world drew in part on his exploration of the idea of uselessness. In the face of the relentless capitalism of the ’80s and ’90s, what did it mean to refuse to participate in the pursuit of wealth and respectability? Bowery’s life revolved instead around the pursuit of highs of different kinds—many of them drug-induced but also related to the ecstasies of performance, community, dance, music, and unbound creativity.

In an introduction at the exhibition’s press preview, one of the curators, Fiontán Moran, said that Bowery’s work asked “how uselessness could be a productive position.” But the very nature of uselessness, and the quality that makes its celebration transgressive, is that it is not productive. Which brings up a kind of bind: The institutionalization of Bowery’s work, which is antiestablishment at its core, feels counter to its ethos in many ways. It’s a catch-22 of course, because the alternative is for art like this never to find its way to wider audiences. But the disconnect between the work in this exhibition—much of it conceived in squat communities and underground clubs—and the robust pillars of the institution of Tate is jarring. It raises important questions about the evolution of the museum space and shifting definitions of “art.”

In a video made for the BBC and screened in the exhibition, Bowery showcases a series of brash outfits of his own design while shopping and having tea at the stuffiest of London department stores, Harrods. His charm is overwhelming from the moment he steps in front of the camera, and I immediately understood how he captivated so many people during his life. He somehow reminded me of Princess Diana, and indeed, the comparison is not that crazy. Both were ’80s icons, both had personalities that were indescribably magnetic, and both dealt with painful life circumstances that were outside their control—for Diana, the royal family and the effects of its accompanying circus; for Bowery, the criminality of his sexual identity and his eventual death (in 1994) from an AIDS-related illness.

On the surface, Bowery’s club culture and the psychedelic frivolity of his so-called uselessness was about the pursuit of pleasure. But pain underlies this whole show. Darkness shadowed Bowery’s life, both on and behind the proverbial canvas, screen, and stage. In complex and conflicting ways, the exhibition shows how vigorously he danced with the devils that haunted him, from his early days in zit-inspired polka dots to his later ones giving bloody birth over and over, as if in the hope that he might deliver a new world. 

The room comes into focus slowly. It’s an intimate space, with clothing strewn across a chair and a glimpse of a bed frame on the left side of the canvas. Seen through an open door is a smaller room. Warmed by sunlight, it invites us in, but it doesn’t offer us the detail that would make it truly legible.

A Dressing Room was painted by Ethel Sands in the early 20th century, probably between 1910 and 1920. Sands was painting the innermost space of a bedroom she shared with her life partner, Anna “Nan” Hope Hudson. It’s tempting to read it as the metaphorical closet that Sands and Hudson hovered on the threshold of throughout their long relationship. The two women never openly called themselves lesbian, homosexual, or even “sapphic” (the term of choice among upper-class women in Britain at the time)—at least not in any surviving record. Sands was a close friend of Virginia Woolf and well acquainted with many artists and other creative personalities who lived their queer identities much more openly, but she and Hudson chose not to.

As an artist, Sands made beautiful and distinctive paintings that engaged with many of the key aesthetic questions at stake in the development of modernism. The concept of “the modern” is constructed in contrast to the past, but Sands ebbs comfortably among the artistic tides of previous eras in a way that unsettles the usual understanding of modernity as a hard rupture with everything that came before it. In her art, as in her personal life, she looked backward as much as she looked forward, expanding the way modernism cam be understood.

Sands was born in America in 1873 but brought up in England by parents who were close friends of the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII). She existed in a cosmopolitan elite throughout her life. When she was a teenager, her parents died suddenly, one after the other, leaving her a significant inheritance. That she chose to use this privilege to pursue a career as an artist and establish a home with her lesbian partner is remarkably modern. But her peers perceived her as very old-fashioned. Her paintings and home decorating taste were said to have something of the 18th century about them in their “fatal prettiness,” to use Vanessa Bell’s description. Her choice to live “respectably,” including not flaunting her queer identity in the manner of characters like Gertrude Stein or Romaine Brooks, has been read by both friends and 21st-century critics as either a sign of fundamental boringness or the result of homophobic oppression.

The wider modernist movement is defined by the drive to innovate, shock, and challenge. Its story has traditionally been told through the development of abstraction from Impressionism to the Abstract Expressionists, following a series of now-iconic male artists through -ism after -ism. But Sands, who grappled with many of the same visual questions as her peers in the two most prominent avant-garde groups with which she was associated—the Camden Town Group and the Bloomsbury Group—had a different ethos. Like her male peers, she painted modern life, but modern life for her was defined by financial, social, and domestic independence. As a wealthy heiress, she was able to construct a life exactly as she wished. She reveled in decorating her homes to her taste, living and socializing where she wished, and making art. She was also a prolific hostess, a role that overshadowed her career as an artist, and one that has traditionally fallen on wealthy women. Her friend Leslie Hartley remembered being “dazzled by the social glitter” of Sands’s life. Her friendships defined her, energized her, challenged her.

Although her home was usually packed with guests, Sands’s paintings are more often empty. Works like The Chintz Couch, which depicts her home in London, or Open Door, showing a room in the chateau she and Hudson bought in northern France, share the cheerful palette yet eerie emptiness of A Dressing Room. One exception is Tea with Sickert, which shows us the artist Walter Sickert and a female guest in a wonderfully big hat. Sickert was a close friend of Sands and Hudson and was the founder of the Camden Town Group, which excluded women. (Also a raging misogynist, he never took Sands particularly seriously as an artist and relied on her to play hostess when he needed it.)

A Times review of Sands’s solo exhibition at London’s Goupil Gallery in 1922 remarked that “you can see, here and there, traces of the visionary squalor of Mr. Walter Sickert, but with her it has lost its irony, its slovenliness, and has become healthy, sunlit, and happy.” To Sickert that would have been an insult; his modernism was defined by slovenliness. But the review points to the very way in which Sands expands what modernism, and modernity, can be. Her painterly brushwork, which is deeply concerned with the materiality of oil paint, her fascination with light and color, her interest in the French post-Impressionists like Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard, and her exploration of disjointed space all engage with the major aesthetic currents of modernism. She is not confined by the Baudelairean flaneur model of the modern artist. Instead, she invents a new way of representing modernity that is equally striking.

Sands was a magnetic figure: Her personal charm radiates across time even now through the memories of her many, many friends. Her paintings are both gorgeous and unsettling. There is a fundamental sense of enigma or opacity about Sands that is fascinating but has also contributed to her sidelining in the history of art. The paradoxes she embodies—innovative but old-fashioned, radical but respectable, rich but ambitious, extroverted but guarded—make her a nexus of the contradictions and dynamism of modernity.

Read more of our Women’s History Month coverage here.

Like all interesting people, Ithell Colquhoun was a mass of contradictions. She was obsessed with sex but uninterested in romantic relationships. She was radical in her art but fundamentally traditional in many aspects of her life. She was an occultist and spiritualist, but she never committed to any one system of belief. She is best remembered for her involvement in British Surrealism, but that period was short-lived. Her life’s work was expansive and deeply mystical. It remains completely bizarre, and completely hypnotic decades down the line.

Margaret Ithell Colquhoun—the subject of a major exhibition at Tate St Ives featuring more than 200 works and archival materials related to her life and career—was born in India in 1906, into a white British family that had lived and worked in the British colonial administration in India for generations. It was a strange start: not especially unusual among a certain category of the British middle classes at the height of Britain’s imperial age, but still strange in that it left her uncertain about where she belonged. Colquhoun grew up in England, mostly away from her parents, but retained a strong affinity for India. She never knew quite where to place her heritage: she felt that she deserved an Indian identity, but she understood that she was not Indian. She never really felt English either. Her understanding of herself was a product of the convoluted power structures of colonial Britain. In her unpublished autobiography Until Twelve, she wrote “Where am I, between east and west? A lost soul indeed.”

That liminality led Colquhoun on a lifelong quest for enlightenment. She wasn’t really concerned with finding a sense of belonging in the mortal realm, however—she wanted to transcend it. Colquhoun was a Perennialist, and as such she believed that all the belief systems on earth were leading to the same ultimate truth, and were based in the same ancient myths and wisdom. Her slightly chaotic pinballing from one magical society to another throughout her life reflects this fundamental principle.

It is possible to trace many of the strands of belief that comprise Colquhoun’s tapestry of a worldview, as Amy Hale did in her excellent 2020 biography Ithell Colquhoun: Genius of the Fern-Loved Gully. Hale calls the artist a “nexus of all the major occult currents of the twentieth century.” Colquhoun rejected any existing way of seeing the world in search of one that felt truer. As she made her way through a century that became defined by its loss of faith, she grappled with the challenge of how to create meaning without the authority of a governing religious system. Her guiding principles have long stymied viewers of her work, particularly art historians who have turned up their noses at the idea that she might actually have believed all the stuff that she talked about.

Rising interest in occult-minded artists—the “Shamanic turn,” as Hale calls it—has created space for artists, many of them women, who previously did not fit into existing narratives of art history. As figures like Hilma af Klint, Leonora Carrington, and Emma Kunz have emerged from obscurity, the previously hidden relevance of spirituality has been noted in the lives of others, from Piet Mondrian to Agnes Martin. The esoteric will never sit completely comfortably in the mainstream, because that’s the point of it: to be unusual, bizarre, absurd. But it is undeniably a strong current in 19th- and 20th-century art. With the Tate show, which travels from St Ives to Tate Britain in June, Colquhoun is the next artist to finally get her due.

COLQUHOUN FIRST SAW the innovative work of the French Surrealists in 1936, and it had a profoundly rupturing effect on her painting as well as her writing, which included novels, memoirs, nonfiction, and poetry that was Surrealist in nature. Going from the staid post-Impressionism of her artistic education at London’s Slade School of Fine Art to a world of dreams, magic, and the uncanny opened a door. She was a member of the British Surrealist group from the late 1930s to 1940, but quickly left (or was pushed out), due partly to her interest in occultism and partly to the group’s general listlessness and controlling leader, E.L.T. Mesens. But Colquhoun continued to claim the Surrealist mantle throughout her career, even though the movement never took root in Britain the way it had in Paris.

She was briefly married to Toni del Renzio, a fellow Surrealist reject. Their marriage was rocky, and Colquhoun never had a long-term relationship thereafter. Her art, however, demonstrates her powerful interest in the erotic and intimate. She painted sexually disturbed scenes, including some evoking castration, as well as explicit depictions of penetrative sex and more romantic scenes of nude male and female figures entwined.

In Scylla (1938),which is in Tate’s collection and has become one of Colquhoun’s best-known works, two rocky outcroppings rise out of water, a large growth of coral under the water between them, the prow of a boat floating toward it. The rocks are very phallic, with fleshy tones and skin-like wrinkles. But the scene is also easily read as a woman’s view of her own body in the bath, with crinkly knees rising from the water and a curly bush between her legs. The approaching boat lends a narrative, and it is hard not to read it sexually. Is it an approaching hand, a penis, or—referencing the Greek myth in the title—a party of men to devour?

Some of Colquhoun’s most striking paintings are even more explicitly vulvar, like Attributes of the Moon (1947) and Alcove I (1946). They imagine female anatomy as a landscape, using a flat, tight style to evoke an erotic dreamscape. It’s easy to compare them to Georgia O’Keeffe’s genitalia-esque flowers, but Colquhoun’s work is much more aggressive. Her interest in the clitoris, which is always clearly articulated, makes these works more than just sensual: they suggest pleasure, play, deviance, and voyeurism.

This body of work refuses a clear biographical reading as well as an obvious feminist one. Colquhoun’s goal was liberation, but not just from the patriarchy: she wanted to be free of all earthly concerns. Androgyny, or a union between male and female on a divine plane, was one of the paths she saw to enlightenment. Her tight, knotty paintings of male and female bodies overlapping evoke her desire for the genders to be united—though she sometimes painted two bodies of the same sex, reflecting her own ambiguous queerness. Her intense focus on biology also reflects a sense of essentialism that goes beyond just erotic and gendered bodies. She was after essential truths, and believed that people, places, and things had power and resonance that were inherent to their role in the universe.

COLQUHOUN BEGAN LIVING part-time in Cornwall, a rugged and remote coastal county in the southwest of England, in 1947, eventually moving there full-time in the late ’50s. She was drawn to the region’s Celtic legacy, finding in it an amalgamation of the attractions of Eastern spirituality and British ethnicity. The Cornwall that Colquhoun inhabited was constructed in the English imagination in the 19th century as “other” and exotic, at the very moment that its mining economy was collapsing
and the English government was centralizing control over the region.

Celtic identity was fraught in Britain, adopted and embellished by English Protestants to reflect an idealized romantic past for the British Isles, while also claimed by groups who had a different (and arguably stronger) claim to indigeneity and marginality, like the Cornish, Scottish, and Irish. Colquhoun lived rustically in Cornwall, in a cabin with no electricity or plumbing, but she long maintained a flat in London to which she could escape when the discomforts of such living grew too great. When she finally moved permanently to Cornwall, she lived in a much more comfortable home. She had the attitude of many wealthy urbanites who seek the simple life, romanticizing it, and never fully committing to its inconveniences.

Throughout her time in Cornwall, Colquhoun was especially mesmerized by ancient monuments and stones. She included them in her work in various ways, such as in Landscape with Antiquities (Lamorna) (1950), which depicts an imagined bird’s-eye view of the land around her home in the Cornish village of Lamorna dotted with shapes like stone circles and neolithic monuments. Some of them have rippling lines expanding outward, representing their energy fields—an idea she explored more imaginatively in her slightly earlier work Dance of the Nine Opals (1942), which also depicts a stone circle creating an intense aura of energy and magic.

The Perennialism that drove Colquhoun’s occultism as well as her desire for rustic living eventually overlapped significantly with Traditionalism, an anti-modern 20th-century philosophy. As she aged, Colquhoun’s commitment to ancient wisdom and magic expanded to include a distaste for and distrust of modernity. She had a conservative attitude to progress, believing that the path to enlightenment lay in ancient magic, not in anything the future, or even the present, could offer. She lived to see a revival of interest in Surrealism in the 1970s, but she was still not given the focused attention her work deserved. She died in 1988 in Cornwall, leaving her estate to the National Trust with the intention that it be sold to acquire and preserve wild land in Cornwall. That final choice encapsulates Colquhoun’s lack of interest in earthly fame.

The simultaneously backward-looking and radical nature of Colquhoun’s work has made it difficult to categorize and challenging to parse—but, at the same time, magnetic in its uniqueness. While she did touch one of the 20th century’s major art movements, Colquhoun was not driven by trends or even by the art world at all. She was relentlessly idiosyncratic and true to herself.

“I think we often want things to be resolved so that we can understand them,” Rachel Jones told me from her studio in London. “And it’s like, well, sometimes you can understand things in a more complicated way.” Jones’s work has always grappled with liminality: between painting and drawing, abstraction and figuration, the past and the present. She has been working as a painter for more than a decade now, after studying at the Glasgow School of Art and getting her master’s at the Royal Academy Schools in London in 2019. As she moves into a new stage in her practice, she has become even more comfortable working in unresolved—and perhaps unresolvable—ways.

Last fall, Jones cowrote and produced Hey, Maudie, an opera performed at St James’s Piccadilly in London that represented a completely new direction in her work. She described the process of making it as like “leaping off a cliff.” When she returned to painting after, Jones found herself approaching her original medium with a new freedom, an openness to new possibilities. “I think that boldness is a direct link to the experience I had of making the opera—knowing what it is to take steps into the unknown, but having faith in the inherent desire I have to express myself in a multitude of ways,” she said.

A new body of work made for “!!!!!,” her first solo exhibition in the United States, at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco (through September 1), marks the first time Jones has painted on linen rather than canvas. The works still have her signature vibrant color fields made with strong, textured strokes of oil pastel, but for the first time they incorporate significant areas of bare, untouched negative space that bring the texture of the linen support into the composition. “With the linen, I felt like there was already quite a lot happening in the weave and natural dye,” Jones said. That material became a sort of color field in and of itself, rather than a blank space that needed to be filled.

Jones has long been fascinated by mouths and teeth, using them as a central motif in her works from the 2010s to the present, and often referencing them in the titles of works and exhibitions (including lick your teeth, they so clutch and SMIIILLLLEEEE, both 2021, and the 2020 diptych, A Sliced Tooth). Her mouths do not smile: they speak instead to the long and complex history of the representation of Blackness in art and the many ways we use our mouths to convey meaning.

Language is central to the way Jones thinks and works, despite her paintings’ seeming lack of narrative. She says she gets most of her inspiration from reading rather than looking at other things, and she hopes to find more outlets for her writing practice going forward. Jones’s visceral articulation of purpose helps explain the palpable sense of depth in her paintings. She is fascinated by the challenge of communicating multiple truths at once, constantly navigating the duality between the real and the imagined.