The Alchemical Sisters — Dumb Supper

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 soror 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 precariou