The Living Stones: Cornwall
Ithell Colquhoun, 1957
Recommended by Niamh Lawlor
Whilst the work of painter Ithell Colquhoun has attracted more attention in recent years, her status as a unique writer of place in the twentieth century remains largely overlooked. Perhaps the 2024 republication of The Living Stones: Cornwall (1957) by Pushkin Press and the soon to be re-released The Crying of the Wind: Ireland (1955) will lead new readers to visit these distinctive works and see the already vivid world of Ithell Colquhoun’s paintings enriched by the deeply sensory evocations of landscape across these two texts.
The Living Stones: Cornwall details the artist’s arrival at Lamorna, where she would come to set up her rural studio and characterise herself the ‘Bride of Quietness’ – safely nestled within the rural Cornish landscape away from the offensive and stifling noise pollution of London. From her new Cornish studio, which she christened “Vow Cave”, Colquhoun offers accounts of her own first-hand interactions with the iconic landscapes of her paintings. The book’s episodic chapters see Colquhoun traverse the Cornish landscape, guided by the magnetic pull of the counties’ stone circles, holy wells and ancient crosses. As with many of Colquhoun’s paintings, these spaces are typically represented as being uninhabited by any other human presence and in turn provide their most sincere and respectful pilgrims with unadulterated access to what the artist believed to be their deeply numinous influence. Colquhoun’s Cornwall is an animist’s landscape – in which each tree, well, hill and stone tells a story which provides a palpable point of access to the foregone Celtic world the artist detected in every aspect of her surroundings. In The Living Stones, Colquhoun strives to give voice to the stories and wisdom embodied in this ancient and sacred environment in a unique piece of place-based writing that combines travelogue, folklore, memoir, local history, geological studies and early twentieth century mysticism.
Read about the ongoing Tate exhibition ‘Ithell Colquhoun: Between Worlds’ here.