Alex Bispham

Doctoral Research

Painting the unseen: queerness and alternative spirituality in contemporary art

Supervisor: Dr Pia Gottschaller

Advisor: Professor Jo Applin

My research examines the methods of artists with an alternative spiritual practice working today. Through a series of case studies, I seek to define a cohesive queer theory of materials.

The reception of the Swedish mystic and painter Hilma af Klint (1862-1944), and the collaborative process behind the series The Paintings for the Temple (1906-1915), provide important context for my thesis. In it, I propose that attending to marginalised histories offers new frameworks for material research today. Artists working with alternative legacies of modernism like these resist the hylomorphic model of creation and subvert heteropatriarchal norms.

The New-York based collective Hilma’s Ghost explicitly channels the artist and other women, trans, and non-binary practitioners. Further case studies including Devan Shimoyama, Salomée Souag, and Alice Bucknell propose diverse engagements with spirituality that thereby queer process, media, and techniques.

My queer approach extends from historiography, through temporality, to the stratigraphy of a painting. I suggest that the spiritual and material are intertwined: artworks are both vehicles of transcendence and enact material change in the physical world.