As I approach the end of a three month artist residency at Creative Spark I realise I have simply too much to tell you. So this blog post will begin the huge task by featuring the very special event last Friday evening that coincided with my time in Dundalk.
Jennifer Higgie
The Other Side, A Journey into Women, Art and the Spirit World.
Talk by the Author at Roe River Books, Clanbrassil Street, Dundalk organised by Mark Corcoran of Culture Club Dundalk, Friday, 24th May 2024.
Mark introduced Jennifer to the packed bookshop, listing an impressive career in the arts spanning decades. After studying painting in art school in Australia, she moved to London.
So how did Jennifer end up standing in front of me in Roe River Books? The connection to Dundalk goes way back; through her sister, Suzie, who played a gig in the town nearly twenty years ago (Jennifer did the babysitting). The book is dedicated to her magical, musician sister. The title of the book; The Other Side, implies two meanings, as Jennifer explains during the Q&A at the end; the spiritual ‘other side’ and the ‘other side’ of art history; which is rich with work by women artists and other members of western society who don’t fit into the white gent category.
Jennifer began by reading the prologue of the book before moving onto a slideshow, illustrating the journey of women in art and the spirit world. The journey begins 35,000 BCE with a tiny, 6cm form of a woman known as Venus of Hole Fels. It is the first recorded anthropomorphic figure in human history and it is a woman. It immediately reminded me of our Sheela-na-gig figures which you can still find in walls around the country, dating from as early as the 11th Century.
Which brings us nicely up to the era of Hildegard Von Bingen. The more I read about women in art history, the more I discover about this extraordinary German Benedictine abbess. She was gifted with visions which guided her in the arts. She didn’t talk about these visions until she’d spoken with the pope and got his blessing. She spent 10 years compiling her celebrated work, Scivias (Know the Way), a three part account of creation, redemption and salvation. Paintings of her visions included one of the universe as a cosmic egg complete with depictions of the land and the stars. Jennifer recommended listening to Hildegard’s musical compositions in times of stress. Her composition, Ordo virtutum (c. 1151), is the oldest surviving musical drama not written for church use.
The spiritual ‘other side’ really comes to the fore in Jennifer’s book around the time of the American Civil war when 2% of the population lost their lives. Families were eager to communicate with loved ones and Modern Spiritualism erupted from female energy. Sisters Maggie and Kate Fox toured the country, championing spiritualism, renouncing it then championing it again.
Spirit photography became a thing; portraits made with living (and deceased) sitters. Mary Todd Lincoln had a photograph made of herself and her dead husband.
But the most fascinating character this realm has to offer is the Russian aristocrat, Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (H.P.B). She laid the ground work for the New Age Movement all the way back in the late 1800s. Her exploits are stuff of legends and the subject of many books and followers. Jennifer writes about her so well and her book seamlessly moves onto the artists inspired by the New Age movement like AF Klint.
I’m currently re-reading Jennifer’s book but its also great to dip into. I emphatically recommend it and Jennifer will be back in Ireland to open an exhibition at the Highlands Gallery in Drogheda; Alena Egan & Isabel Nolan, Material Flux, 29 June – 10 August, Lower Gallery.