After its success in London in the summer of 2025, Tranceducers: Art of Visionaries, Mediums and Automatists will open in St Ives, Cornwall on March 14th 2026. It is an exhibition that explores artistic practices shaped by alternative perceptions, otherworldly transmissions and intuitive mark-making. Featuring both historical pioneers and contemporary practitioners from around the world, the show promises to be a mesmerising experience.
In mediumistic art, works are often believed to be repositories of hidden wisdom, or to carry messages from other worlds. Automatist artists relinquish full conscious control, allowing themselves to become a conduit for unseen forces, connecting the macrocosm and microcosm with echoes of alchemical and esoteric cosmologies. Visionary artists, meanwhile, offer radically different ways of seeing the universe, revealing dimensions we may have sensed but never fully perceived. Together, the twenty four artists in Tranceducers have encompassed these ideas and created artworks that occupy an enigmatic and liminal space between the material and the marvellous.
The exhibition includes historically important artists like Madge Gill whose mediumistic drawings are receiving renewed attention after being shown at the Venice Biennale in 2024, as well as little known artists like Aleksandra Ionowa whose drawings are attuned to the invisible energies of the natural world. The show features art that has the ability to mesmerise its beholder, such as the swirling vortices of this year’s Turner Prize winner, Nnena Kalu, the kaleidoscopic cosmogrammes of Louise Janin, the meditative mandalas of Victor Bramley whose artistic journey began in St Ives in 1959.
A prominent theme of the exhibition is the concept of the mantic stain, a term used by artist and occultist Ithell Colquhoun, whose work is represented in the show. The phrase refers to marks made through chance-driven techniques such as decalcomania, fumage, stillomancy, parsemage, and ecremage. Rather than being intentionally depicted, forms emerge as revelations from the unconscious. Championed by the Surrealists, but with roots in mediumistic practice, these artworks function as instruments of visual alchemy and divination, transcending the raw materials from which they are created into forms of mysterious wonders.
Spanning over 100 years, Tranceducers, 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 ~ Victor Bramley ~ Etty Buzyn ~ Ithell Colquhoun ~ Madge Donohoe ~ Ernest J Gerrard ~ Madge Gill ~ Amy Grantham ~ Greg Humphries ~ Aleksandra Ionowa ~ Louise Janin ~ Nnena Kalu ~ Josef Kotzian ~ Cara Macwilliam ~ Cecilie Marková ~ Marianne McCarthy ~ Allen o2o Moore ~ Jacque Moran ~ Chris Neate ~ Grace Pailthorpe ~ Kate Southworth ~ Cathy Ward and Sue Williams A’court.
14th July – 20th March 2026
Opening Reception: Saturday 14 July 4-7pm All welcome
Sunday to Thursday 10am – 6pm and Friday 10 to 5pm
Crypt Gallery, Norway Square, St Ives, Cornwall, TN26 1 NA
Curated by Vivienne Roberts ~ vivienne@vivienneroberts.com
Free admission
Learn more about the artists in the Tranceducers St Ives exhibition by clicking on the thumbnails below.
