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 queer the distinction between the immaterial and the material.

Beginning with an exploration 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), my thesis proposes 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.

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