The Alchemical Sisters — Dumb Supper

The Alchemical Sisters first exhibition. A Dumb Supper is an ancient ritual for making contact with the beloved dead, at the time of year when the veil between this world and the next is at its thinnest. About The Alchemical Sisters: Dumb Supper Is everyone ready? The candles all lit? Are the mirrors all dark? Then at the dumb supper let's sit. 1 As Halloween draws near, and the veil between the living and the dead is thinned, psychic connections become stronger. The Alchemical Sisters, a group of nine female and non-binary artists brought together by Ruth Calland at the beginning of the year, have chosen this time to sit down and honour the dead and departed, documenting their dumb supper ritual and sharing it with a wider presence, along with a carefully curated selection of their occult and mystical works. Carl Jung viewed alchemy not as primitive chemistry, for turning lead into gold, but as a projection of the unconscious individuation process, where the feminine principle is represented by the hidden soul ( anima ) and the transformative matrix ( prima materia ) required to unite opposites. The authenticity and humanity of women are celebrated in the occult, where they are allowed to be wild and emotional without being labelled ‘hysterical’. Historical alchemists often worked alongside a female adept, known as the s oror mystica , or mystical sister. However, we know that female alchemists also existed in their own right, hence the Alchemical Sisters. Historically, the ‘witch’ or ‘occult practitioner’ was a transgressive figure persecuted by patriarchal authority. Today, a new generation of female and queer curators is using the occult to create an alternative value system that operates outside of conventional, masculine art canons. The art critic Waldemar Januszczak notes: ‘The art world has developed a passion for witchery, the occult, tarot, all forms of hocus-pocus … Up and down today’s art world, on all its levels, we are watching a retreat from reason and a stampede towards unreason … A big cause, probably the biggest, is that occult fantasies can be reshaped easily into attacks on the true enemy here – the patriarchy.’2 But perhaps the occult simply gives us a language for what rational culture has learned to ignore – intuition, ambiguity, ritual, symbols and the unseen. Perhaps we are not finding something new at all, but recovering ancient feminine principles. Art has always lived close to that threshold, and, as the artist Paul Klee noted: ‘Art doesn't reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.’ This is especially clear in the work of Selma Mäkelä, the daughter of a Sufi and granddaughter of a water diviner. Her paintings, which capture fleeting fragments of time, deal with distance and dislocation, displacement and migration. No Looking Back (2026), for example, shows men trudging down a nebulous railway track, passing through the veil, with a sense of both becoming and unbecoming. Gustav Being Tree (2026) similarly portrays a process, despite the stative of the title, of transmutation: human and nature become one. ‘When I make work,’ Mäkelä says, ‘things are coming and going. I’m getting lost in worlds.’ Multimedia artist Andrea G Artz not only gets lost in worlds, but she creates them, literally. Her recent VR (virtual reality) installation, Ghost Weight Experience (GWE), explores ideas around death, memorialisation and photography, as well as the poetic aspects of our human rituals for remembering the departed. Here she is showing the characters who inhabit this realm, 3D figures made from folded 2D photographs, or, as fellow sister Sarah Sparkes describes them, ‘folded time’. Through them, Artz probes the cyclical forces of creation, destruction and regeneration. Sarah Sparkes herself makes large-scale drawings, created from memory and imagination, making marks and erasing them, before seeking new imagery in what has been rubbed out. Using a form of scrying – seeing the paper as a ‘black mirror’ – Sparkes opens a door to her subconscious and allows images through on to the paper. The outcome is a mythical narrative and the visualisation of anomalous phenomena, in which she seeks to find wisdom. The picture hangs like a large scroll, holding the knowledge and vernacular belief systems of our ancestors. Noga Shatz’s Babushka (2015), a digital drawing printed on Perspex, is tombstone-shaped and broken through, with spindly branches waving, as if a portal has been perforated into the thin veil between this world and the next. It is at once ethereal and spine-tingling. Inner Skin (2026), a loop-based video-installation, presents two young female bodies performing a healing ceremony for a buried witch from the Bairro Alto neighbourhood in Lisbon. They have ghostly voices, are apparitions almost, moving as if trying to capture and keep a hold of the ephemeral. Shatz’s figures exist, not as symbols, but as a lens through which to examine the position of women and queer bodies within contemporary culture. The queer body is also at the centre of Francesca Alaimo’s work, which explores identity, dysphoria, shame and courage. Greetings from Paradise (2024-25) is a series of digitally-reworked photocollages, the jovial appearance of which belies the heartbreaking subject matter of regrets for important conversations left too late with the ones we love. The pictures depict the body of a queer, non-binary, female, masculine-of-centre artist as they struggle to learn to accept their physical body. Hi Mom (2026) and Hi Dad (2026), digital collages of original paintings and drawings, juxtapose this ambiguous and ambivalent self with the patriarchal norms of a family construct. Ambiguity plays a key role in Jungian analyst Ruth Calland’s painting, The Lost (2026). A limp body, mouth open as if to cry out, is carried by multiple hands into a stormy blue sky. Inspired by imagery of pro-Palestine protesters being removed by the police, it paradoxically mirrors footage of grieving relatives carrying away their dead. Calland’s practice has returned often to the alchemical concept of coniunctio, the holding and bringing together of opposites. In this tender piece they explore the precariousness and fragility of lives and bodies held in a state of suspension. Two drawings of severed hands continue the theme: their revivification through the swirling transformation of matter into spirit suggests that the soul is immutable and cannot be destroyed. Avis Underwood, like Calland a psychotherapist, makes paintings which draw on historical paintings, archival photographs, found images and her own drawings. Through layering and reworking, like in Sparkes’ work, figures begin to emerge. Something can remain present within a painting while being partly hidden or beyond reach, the creation of a world outside of reality. Fragonard’s Fancy (2023), like Mäkelä’s No Looking Back, captures fleeting figures, hazy and dynamic, while the fox-faced figures in Shingleback (2026) cling to one another like the girls in Shatz’s video. Young women who encapsulate all the feminine principles the artists seek to rescue from obscurity. Donna McLean claims that it pleases her ‘to put things together that have no business being together. For something appealing to exist alongside an unsettling undercurrent that’s both compelling and disarming.’ Indeed, the uncanny features heavily in her monochrome paintings, which she creates by processes of subtraction. Her use of light is to obliterate what can better be seen in the dark. In Window Selfie (2023), the window glows from the darkened side of the shadowy presence, while, in Man Who Fell to Earth (2021), the water reflects, dazzling the viewer and rendering them unable to see anything beyond an outline. Finally, Ruth Philo, who calls herself ‘the least alchemical’, is perversely the most alchemical of the group. Her abstract paintings are concerned with the concept of the veil, and she uses a grid format and geometric forms to bring together restricted palettes of colour. The triangle in sacred geometry embodies balance, harmony and the union of opposing forces (such as masculine and feminine energies), thus nicely mirroring Jung’s notion of alchemy. Philo’s first job was as an archaeologist; her works, like those of her sisters, arise through layering and paring back, she is always uncovering things. The Alchemical Sisters are interested in the transformational, mystery, magic and healing, and the collective unconscious. Here, in Dumb Supper, they open portals to another realm, honouring and making visible our connection with ongoing ancestral presence.4 To honour the dead of the previous year, a communion of love, and of peace, but not fear. for each we have lost we set a place, for the veil is so thin, with their presence we're graced. Silent we listen, for the hearts we love best, and so we do honour to those who've gone West. 3 References 1. From The Dumb Supper by Lazarus Merlinus, allpoetry.com/poem/2295744-The-Dumb-Supper-by-Lazarus-Merlinus 2. Waldemar Januszczak, Art’s sudden obsession with tarot, magic and the occult, 24 February 2025, waldemar.tv/2025/02/arts-sudden-obsession-with-tarot-magic-and-the-occult/ 3. The Dumb Supper, op cit. 4. Ruth Calland, personal correspondence. © Anna McNay, October 2026 Anna McNay is a writer, editor and international curator, who contributes regularly to a variety of print and online art and photography journals, including Studio International, Art Quarterly and The Flux Review, as well as exhibition catalogues and books. She lectures and hosts panels and in conversation events at galleries, art schools and online. Areas of special interest include representations of the body, gender and sexuality, as well as mental health, chronic illness and the benefits of integrating art into therapy and medicine. She is autistic and her support dog Parsley accompanies her everywhere. #TheCriticWithTheDog Read more Toggle Painting Multi-disciplinary Photography