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Follow me on instagram for news, events and thoughts on the art I love.

mediumisticart

Curating, writing/researching, mediumistic and visionary art. New exhibition Louise Janin June2026
vivienneroberts.com
@madge.gill @georgianahoughton

Happy Birthday Georgiana Houghton born on April 20 Happy Birthday Georgiana Houghton born on April 20th, 1814. 

In 1871 she presented 155 of her spirit drawings in a solo show at the New British Gallery on Old Bond Street, London. She wrote the introduction on her birthday saying “I earnestly hope that some of the visitors to this gallery, who have leisure to devote themselves to it, will go home, and try to obtain this delightful gift, but they must bear in mind that extreme patience and perseverance are needed for all Spiritual work. In my own case, the drawing power would appear to have come with very great rapidity, but they must remember that I had already been a medium for upwards of a year and a half, after having steadily striven for it during these months. For the drawing phase I was also prepared by my own earthly training, having devoted the chief part of my life to that accomplishment.”

Georgiana sat nearly every day in the gallery wearing her day bonnet and posing as a visitor, but ready to explain to those interested in listening all about her enigmatic creations. Clergymen, artists and a microscopist showed the most interest. The critics were baffled. One said it was as if a lady’s wool basket had been tossed about with a toasting fork. Another remarked that a troop of fairies had dropped jewels across a canvas by Turner.
Looking forward to being in Cambridge this week an Looking forward to being in Cambridge this week and speaking about 19th century mediumistic art 

Art History Annual Conference @forarthistory 
Wednesday 8 – Friday 10 April 2026
University of Cambridge @cambridgeuniversity 

Materiality of the Unseen in the Long Nineteenth Century
Thursday 9th April at 10 am Moller Institute Study Centre

The nineteenth century has often been called the “frenzy of the visible” as new theories, technologies, and artistic practices attempted to visualize the previously unseen. Motivated by a greater interest in invisible, hidden, and out-of-reach phenomena such as the climate, the non-visual senses, areas of the globe or cosmos that were generally untraversable, or health-related subjects, artists and makers experimented with ways of visualising such topics
for both specialist and general audiences…

Session Convenors:
Rosalind Hayes, Durham University and Jennifer Marine, University of Virginia

Speakers:
Richard Taws, University College London
Epistolary Drift: Underwater Post and the Siege of Paris

Tairan An, ETH Zurich, Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture
Surface Contact: Robert Mallet’s Forensic Seismology

Sophie Lynch, University of Chicago
Through Glass, Darkly: The Photographic Resolution of Celestial Nebulae

Vivienne Roberts, Independent/Freelance
Felt Presences: Women, Art and Mediumship in Britain and America in the Nineteenth Century.
SAVE THE DATE! Louise Janin: The Echo of the Spir SAVE THE DATE! 
Louise Janin: The Echo of the Spirit through the Rhythms of Life
Curated by Simon Grant @simoncgrant and Vivienne Roberts @mediumisticart 

GPS Gallery
36 Great Pulteney Street
Soho, London 
W1F 9NS

Preview 2nd June 6-8pm

3 - 7th June 2026
10-6pm (Free Admission)

Image: Design by @studio.ardworks
Art Photography: Siyu Chen Lewis
Credit for photograph of Louise Janin: Thérèse Bonney - University of California, Berkeley / BHVP / Roger-Viollet
Highlights from the @outsiderartfair @cavinmorri Highlights from the @outsiderartfair 

@cavinmorrisgallery @andrewedlingallery @galerielemetais @j_lgallery

@cath_garrigue @madge.gill #annazemánková #shinichisawada #AbrahamLincolnWalker
Tranceducers St Ives – Spirit and Soul Flowers: Ce Tranceducers St Ives - Spirit and Soul Flowers: Cecile Markova, Josef Kotzian, Madge Gill @madge.gill and Aleksandra Ionowa. @aleksandraionowa
It’s all in the detail! Tranceducers St Ives and i It’s all in the detail! Tranceducers St Ives and its myriad techniques and textures.

Details from the work of 
@_amygrantham 
Louise Janin
@melissaalley.artist 
Etty Buzyn
@alano_o2o 
@suewilliamsacourt 
@kate_southworth 
@greghumphriesart 
@marianne.mccarthy 
Cathy Ward @wardsisterward
Ernest James Gerrard was born in 1875 in Ince-in-M Ernest James Gerrard was born in 1875 in Ince-in-Makerfield (Lancashire) and died in 1963 in Appleton (a suburb of Warrington). He is buried in Warrington Cemetery.

Gerrard worked as an engineer/technician in the Lancashire steel industry and settled down in Lovely Lane, Warrington with his wife Mary Ann and daughter Enid. Family reports note that Ernest was a collector of antiques, a keen follower of the stock market and an accomplished linguist. He could read Latin, Greek and Arabic and taught himself French and German.

There are no reports why Gerrard became a spiritualist and a drawing medium, but his wife died in 1919 which coincided with the period in which his earliest works were created. Aside from the figurative and abstract forms, his art also shows evidence of unusual mirror writing and backwards script which he said was only possible under spirit control. A form of automatism not often found in mediumistic writing and drawing.

Ernest James Gerrard is a recent rediscovery after 32 of his artworks came up at auction in England in 2025. They found their way to Switzerland and under the guidance of Phillippe Eternod @gdmlausanne several have been placed in prominent collections throughout Europe.

Tranceducers St Ives is the first known exhibition of his works which have such incredible flow and luminosity. 

Images 

Armour, 1926

The Message of Grace, 1928 with poem on reverse

Untitled 1943
Meet Victor Bramley (1933-2014) who found his way Meet Victor Bramley (1933-2014) who found his way to St Ives from Sheffield in 1959 and made Cornwall his home for the rest of his life. He was this part of Cornwall’s first yoga teacher and in the early 1970’s began to create a series of Mandala paintings that were exhibited at the Orion Gallery, Penzance in 1974. This was the year that the gallery amalgamated with the nearby Newlyn Gallery where Ithell Colquhoun also exhibited, showing her amazing Taro series in 1977. 

When I was planning the Tranceducers show last year, I knew it had to ‘come home’ to Cornwall and so here it is - until March 20th at the Crypt Gallery, St Ives. Twenty of Victor’s original mandalas are on display along with work from 22 other like minded artists from over the last one hundred years.

The images show archival material of Victor from the 1960s and 70s in St Ives and nearby Nancledra.
For International Women’s Day 2026 a post dedicate For International Women’s Day 2026 a post dedicated to all the incredible women in the fast approaching Tranceducers St Ives exhibition that opens next Saturday. 🎉🙏🎨

 #ithellcolquhoun 
@_amygrantham 
#gracepailthorpe 
Etty Buzyn
@aleksandraionowa 
#ceciliemarková 
#louisejanin 
#nnenakalu 
@melissaalley.artist 
@caramacwilliam_art 
@kate_southworth 
@wardsisterward 
Madge Donohoe
@marianne.mccarthy 
@suewilliamsacourt 
@madge.gill 
Jacque Moran
Near Islington this weekend? Drop in to see this b Near Islington this weekend? Drop in to see this beautiful group of works by Nicole Frobusch @nicole_frobusch which are part of the Women’s Art Exhibition at the Candid Gallery in Torrens Street near Angel tube. 

Expanding 2023
Cosmos 2024
Rising 2024
John Dee Monad 2026

Nicole creates her works with natural pigments and materials, many collected and ground by herself.
Spirit Photographs containing coded messages from Spirit Photographs containing coded messages from the famous Spiritualist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. They are by the photographic medium Madge Donohoe (1864-1940) and date from the early 1930s.

I have these on consignment for the upcoming Tranceducers St Ives exhibition - dm if interested. Other examples are presently featured in the blockbuster Geister exhibition at the Kunstmuseum in Basel which ends this month. @kunstmuseumbasel 

Madge Donohoe was born Margaret Tilley in Sydney, moving to England in 1899 where she married Irish journalist and war correspondent Martin Donohoe. In England she became an occasional correspondent for Australian newspapers, but after the death of her husband she became known for producing this form of spirit photography called skotographs. Her work shows an extraordinary variety of landscapes, figures, flowers, star constellations, jewels, birds, dogs, hands, eyes, and faces. Her gift was tested in the 1930s by F. W. Warrick, a chemical manufacturer and well-known British psychical researcher.

The word skotograph was coined by the psychic investigator Felicia Scatcherd and is taken from the Greek “Skotog” or darkness, as opposed to “Phos” light, of photograph. Also called a psychograph, it is a picture obtained on a photographic plate which has never been exposed in a camera. 

“My own method of making one is to put an ordinary photographic quarter-plate into the metal carrier which is used in a camera, and then hold it between my hands pressed to my face till taps inside the carrier (or often, jerks of the whole) tell me that the Spirit Photographers wish to speak to me. We converse by means of the taps or jerks and I receive instructions as to the duration or resumption of the sitting etc. Sometimes I am told what I may expect to find when the plate is developed and very often I get news of friends on both sides of Death’s Veil in whom the communicators and I are mutually interested.”
New works for the Tranceducers St Ives show by Chr New works for the Tranceducers St Ives show by Chris Neate @mistertoad1 

Tranceducers is an exploration of artistic practices shaped by alternative perceptions, otherworldly transmissions and intuitive mark-making. Spanning over 100 years it will feature historical pioneers and contemporary practitioners from around the world. 

“Tranceducers St Ives, 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.”

Artists: 
Melissa Alley @melissaalley.artist ~ Victor Bramley ~ Etty Buzyn ~ #IthellColquhoun ~ Madge Donohoe ~ Ernest J. Gerrard ~  Madge Gill @madge.gill ~ Amy Grantham @_amygrantham ~ Greg Humphries  @greghumphriesart ~ Aleksandra Ionowa @aleksandraionowa ~ #LouiseJanin ~ Nnena Kalu @actionspace ~ Josef Kotzian ~ Cara Macwilliam  @caramacwilliam_art ~ Cecilie Marková ~ Marianne McCarthy @marianne.mccarthy ~ Allen o2o Moore @alano_o2o ~ Jacque Moran ~ Chris Neate @mistertoad1 ~ Grace Pailthorpe ~ Kate Southworth @kate_southworth ~ Cathy Ward  @wardsisterward ~ Sue Williams A’Court @suewilliamsacourt 

14 - 20 March 2026
Crypt Gallery, Norway Square, St Ives, Cornwall, TR26 1NA 

Hours: Saturday 4-7pm,  Sunday to Thursday 10-6pm ~ Friday 10-5pm 

Curator: Vivienne Roberts @mediumisticart - vivienneroberts.com
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