Cover Image (front and back): Installation view with Talismanic Sigils and Sacred Altar, 2024
HILMA’S GHOST
Spectral Visions: A Feminist Collective Signals Magickal Futures
May 12 - June 1, 2024
Essay by Amy Hale
Photographs by Nathan Keay
A select survey of works from 2021 to the present:
ABSTRACT TAROT DRAWINGS
CHROMAGICK DRAWINGS
THEOREM PAINTINGS
SIGILS and THOUGHT FORMS
COSMIC ALTAR
Image on previous spread: Installation view, SECRIST | BEACH, Chicago, 2024
Installation view, SECRIST | BEACH, Chicago, 2024
Hilma’s Ghost: A Love Letter to the Wyrd, Feminist Magics, and the Spirits of the Future
by Amy Hale
From October of 2018 to April of 2019, The Solomon R Guggenheim Museum in New York presented a show that rippled through the popular consciousness, becoming the most visited exhibition in the history of that museum and shifting our perceptions of the history of art forever Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future displayed for the first time in the United States, the huge, glowing abstractions of Swedish esoteric artist Hilma af Klint (1862-1944), a woman who is frequently subject to narratives of loss and rediscovery, whose spiritualist, Theosophical and Rosicrucian inflected works changed the story of abstraction These visionary works, filled with curvaceous geometric forms in pinks, yellows, soft blues, and mauve, many of them quite large, inspired awe and wonder in viewers, but perhaps most importantly, it placed
women at the front and center of these reconsidered stories of artistic innovation The colors, forms, and presence of these paintings, which attempted to capture the unseen patterns of the universe and life itself, reshaped the foundational characterizations of abstraction, previously presented as a profound intellectual and theoretical movement divorced from the assumed irrationality of religiosity. However, these early abstractions were attempting to communicate transcendent spiritual concepts theorizing the deep structures of reality that could not be represented any other way. Although af Klint’s efforts to show her work during her lifetime were generally unsuccessful and misunderstood, the general response to the Guggenheim show was nothing less than seismic. It was from this
Hilma af Klint in her studio around 1902
Guggenheim exhibition that the seeds for the collective known as Hilma’s Ghost were first planted, a project about community, magic, art, and relationships. As a guiding spirit, af Klint’s influence winds through the values and work of her namesake collective, like so many etheric tendrils steering a planchette on a message board.
By way of a short introduction of af Klint herself, as the daughter of a military family, she was born into a comfortable circumstance, spending her youth immersed in nature, enjoying summers at her family’s island estate. She had a quite conventional arts education at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm, where she excelled at portraiture and landscapes. In 1891, she started receiving messages from the spirit realm, prompting an intense interest in the Spiritualist movement that had emerged from New York State in the mid-nineteenth century and was sweeping Europe as well as the United States. Mediumship was especially embraced by women, who were popularly believed to have a closer relationship to the spirit realm and could therefore more easily commune with the dead. Af Klint also explored other emerging esoteric philosophies of the time, such as Theosophy, pioneered by the charismatic Helena Blavatsky, and Rosicrucianism which were being made popular in literary and artistic circles in Britain
by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Perhaps one of af Klint’s greatest spiritual influences, however, was Rudolf Steiner, founder of Anthroposophy, a breakaway movement from Theosophy Steiner was a highly original and syncretic thinker as well as a popular lecturer who theorized about nature, science, color, architecture and education. Af Klint, along with a cadre of artistic collaborators, wove these esoteric influences into a vast and complex body of work that is abstract and highly symbolic, attempting to communicate ideas about the natural world and unseen supernatural realities that she created via communication with ethereal entities, and, in fact, with a group of other women. Af Klint’s work was truly a team effort.
Séance room used by The Five Stockholm, 1890s
While it has always been known that af Klint worked with a group of women known as The Five, a group of Theosophical mystics with whom she held seances and created paintings using automatic methods, we are only now starting to understand the role of collaboration in works that have, until recently, been believed to have been created only by af Klint. Af Klint worked with others, most notably Anna Cassel, who may also have been af Klint’s lover for a while, in the process of creating many of the large and significant pieces now only attributed solely to her Likely in the future, these pieces will have multiple attributions. The Five, themselves a collective, were mediums working from 1896 to 1908, and many of their creations were also shaped with the guidance and inspiration of otherworldly interlocutors who they referred to as The High Masters. As we learn more about the nature of the complex collaboration involved in the creation of af Klint’s oeuvre, af Klint and her position in the history of art changes. Af Klint’s “discovery” has been so inspirational, yet this story too is in the process of unfolding, and the story of her art may be even more radical than anyone had originally imagined. Hilma af Klint has been feted as a hidden innovator, a visionary talent, a pioneer of abstraction, yet she likely would have not have claimed this recognition for herself, as she saw herself as a vehicle for the divine and also freely acknowledged the group processes involved in creating these pieces, “a realm inhabited by a plurality of spirits ”
Reframing af Klint’s story from one of unsung individual genius to one of collaboration and multiplicity does af Klint no disservice in the historical record, for it is so very likely how she understood the process of creation between both her worldly and spirit partners. However, many of our narrative and mythic frameworks really do not accommodate collectives well, and they should. Instead, we prize individual contributions and achievements and love the stories of great innovators. It is almost anathema to consider that artists would potentially sacrifice the idea of ownership, of ego, of being named, to promote something which is bigger, inclusive, and generous, yet these are the values and the methods that drive Hilma’s Ghost.
The Beginnings of Hilma’s Ghost
The collective known as Hilma’s Ghost was not born in a single moment, it evolved from a variety of encounters and inspirations In the Fall of 2018, Chicago-based gallery owner Carrie Secrist and a number of artists including Dannielle Tegeder and Sharmistha Ray visited the af Klint show at the Guggenheim and, like so many, were transformed. Ray was already making spiritually-minded abstractions influenced by tantric traditions. In 2019, Tegeder created a body of bright abstractions in response to af Klint’s work for her solo exhibition Episodes.
The next year, just as the world was falling into the grip of the pandemic, Secrist organized a show inspired by af Klint and The Five, Only Connect, comprising women artists organized around connection, communication, and mutual support. It is as part of this programming during an online salon series, organized by Carrie Secrist Gallery in 2021, that Ray and Tegeder were first put in artistic conversation with each other, and Hilma’s Ghost emerged.
However, the challenges of the pandemic formed the crucible in which Hilma’s Ghost was truly forged, and to hear Ray and Tegeder tell the story now, they seem somewhat surprised by its meteoric rise. As a response to the isolation of the pandemic, the pair started offering online workshops on esoteric topics with the primary goal of simply bringing people together. It was Secrist who prompted their first collaborative artistic outing by asking them to collaborate on pieces for a booth in the 2021 Armory Show, harmonizing with the show’s theme of “Future as Spectrum.” There, Hilma’s Ghost presented their Abstract Futures Tarot deck, recalling the title of the 2018 af Klint show, consisting of 78 drawings and some related paintings. Ray and Tegeder worked with New York-based witch Sarah Potter to ritually articulate their expectations for the show’s success, stirring their affirmations and intentions into a cauldron on site. While they aimed high with their spell craft, they both knew that an unknown, untested duo might have an uphill battle. Yet, Hilma’s Ghost earned a highly desirable pictorial review in The New York Times and the resultant publicity created quite an astounding buzz. Is this because the magic worked, or is it because this collaboration and the
Installation view of ABSTRACT FUTURES at The Armory Show, Carrie Secrist Gallery, 2021
Putting the potency of the spell work aside, the Abstract Futures tarot deck is a visual feast, strikingly intricate, and a remarkable feat in itself. The colors are vivid and the shapes, strong and confident. The deck is entirely non-figurative and the cards almost appear at times to be in motion, providing an illusion of jagged, vibrating triangles, and whirring, spinning circles. The repeated graphic motifs, for instance, a column of squares for the Knights, or a dotted capsule for the Pages, work more quickly on the narrative imagination than one might initially suppose. Creating 78 tarot cards requires commitment and vision, and the creation of this deck as a joint effort clearly necessitated an extra layer of communication, care, and energetic harmony. Although these works are clearly the result of a coming together of minds and practices, you can still see the stylistic mergings and input of each artist. Abstraction is central to the work of both Ray and Tegeder, with each contributing their own distinctive style to their collaborations Tegeder lends a particular structural restraint to the pieces, suggesting the diagrammatic sensibilities of her own individual work. Ray provides the saturated and dynamic color that illuminates their practice.
Although the Abstract Futures deck took the highly symbolic and ubiquitous RiderWaite-Smith deck as the inspirational starting point, this deck flexes an entirely different set of mantic muscles, requiring reading as an intuitive response to line, shape, and color. For many tarot readers, abstract decks are daunting. Of course, abstraction in general is unsettling to many, as viewers often struggle to find an interpretive foothold in non-representational forms. Abstraction in a divinatory tool that is supposed to promote comfort and certainty to a seeker or querent is doubly challenging, as there are no clear figures, no evident narratives guiding the interpretation. Abstract Futures invites the reader into a different, immersive experience of line and color, more fully developing the reader’s inner faculties in addition to gaining mastery of the deck’s evident visual language. If you surrender to the experience of these abstractions, the deck works on you and stories unfold.
The generation of this deck became foundational to the remarkable process that Hilma’s Ghost employs to create their larger divinatory works Ray and Tegeder first draw cards from the deck and then begin the painting, using the cards to inform the composition, theming, and direction of the piece. It is difficult to accurately convey the impact of these works. They are big, colorful, and simply dazzling. These abstractions feel like maps, circuits, schematics, the elegant systems decoding the interiors of technologies that we rarely get to see. They have a strong geometric presence, with controlled lines and symmetry recalling Emma Kunz or Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn They are not soft and curvy like the works of Hilma af Klint or Georgiana Houghton, yet they are no less inviting.
While there may well be an otherworldly connection guiding the process, these pieces do not feel automatic in the visually scrappy and chaotic way that characterizes Ithell Colquhoun’s decalcomanias. These lines are sharp and crisp and the hues are intoxicatingly bold.
When Tegeder and Ray have completed the work, it is only then that they engage the interpretive process and name the piece as a reading completed by Sarah Potter The titles are long and invocatory: "You are embarking upon a new journey... put your all into it, your whole heart. Explore! Don't be afraid of what you find or what you uncover. Is it too good to be true? No, it’s everything you hoped for and more. This is the inspiration you always desired." These paintings are woven from divinatory messages and are encoded with the power of intention. How might they possibly magnetically impact the space they inhabit, or the viewer?
Magic is central to the operation of this collective and it hangs in the air in every space they have a presence The altar in the Hilma’s Ghost studio is the best kind of altar; messy, busy, syncretic in the way that folk magic spaces can be, dripping with candle wax, saints, herbs, and works in progress. This altar isn’t pretty or decorative, it isn’t a delicate devotional space designed to convince visitors of the artists’ sincerity.
Installation view of Chromagick drawings and Divine Feminine at EXPO Chicago, 2022
Magic happens in this space, every day. It’s part of the process, the way that Ray and Tegeder forge their connections with each other, with the spirits of place, with the ancestral women, trans, and non-binary artists who are their allies. And when you look at the art and community that has overflowed from this connection, you know that magic is real. This magic helped to drive Hilma’s Ghost as a creative project as it spilled forth over the initial container of the tarot project into deeper dimensions and the body of work they have created suggests a truly numinous source of inspiration and passion
The Chromagick project from 2022 also used tarot readings as a basis for eight bright works on paper, but these pieces also contain a journey through the spectrum, with each painting providing a multifaceted experience of a color in a variety of hues and compliments. However, the duo’s sensitivity and penchant for spirited explorations and synchronicities also led them to entirely unexpected pursuits. In 2022, Ray, Tegeder, and Potter were preparing for the Radical Spirits show to be held at Hill-Stead Museum in Farmington, Connecticut, celebrating spiritualism, mediumship and automatism The three were on site at the museum, reading tarot and working to connect with tutelary spirits of the house, when they discovered a long-forgotten velvet painting lying in a dresser drawer. It turned out to be a theorem painting, a relic of a forgotten folk art from the 18th and 19th century, practiced mainly by New England women using stencils on velvet To Hilma’s Ghost this find was a clear sign that they needed to immerse themselves in this process, perhaps to better connect with the ineffable spirits of the place, and the ghosts that still lived on the site of the show.
Installation view of Theorem Paintings at the Hill-Stead Museum, 2022
Ray and Tegeder were so compelled by the spectral interjection, they sought out the tuition of a traditional painter to teach them the technique, which is mostly no longer practiced. The traditional subject matters for a theorem painting were fruit and flowers, often roughly executed, but Hilma’s Ghost’s abstractions rejuvenated this practice, propelling it into luminous new directions, employing automatic processes while creating an explosion of bright jewel-toned forms, meticulously stenciled with oils onto a warm white cotton velvet These pieces are genuinely layered with spirit
Hilma’s Ghost in Context
Hilma’s Ghost is situated within a web of trends and moments impacting not only the art world, but culture in general We are currently experiencing increased attention to the art of women, both contemporary and historical, and the honoring of these artists is a spiritual and creative focal point for Tegeder and Ray. Yet there is also a wider popular embrace of magic which has been slowly emerging since around 2010, but which has accelerated to nearly a fever pitch since the strange year of 2016, the year that all manner of political anomalies occurred in a way that shifted the timeline of the planet forever That unsettling weirdness has caused commentators to suggest on many occasions that the rise of interest in magic and a focus on a growing type of witchcraft, one that is explicitly feminist, diverse, and intersectional, is the result of the world being so ill at ease, arguing that people are falling backward into witchcraft, the occult, and “superstition” as a coping mechanism in the face of persistent instability. This position clearly underestimates the stable core of magic as a power in this world. To assume that magic is merely reactive in times of crisis is to also suggest that it is a method of last resort, that it will disappear back into the shadows when things return back to some sort of imagined baseline of normalcy. This argument ignores the enduring allure and continuity of magic. Yes, magic is a tactic that people in crisis use, which explains the vigorous embrace of folk magic and divination among marginalized groups. Yet magic is also a creative response to simply being alive, to addressing issues of agency and reciprocity, and an artful way to nourish and support relationships with all manner of beings seen and unseen. Magic and esotericism never disappeared. The idea that people are “rediscovering” forgotten or abandoned magics in any part of the world is, simply, a fiction. This is not a fad, and it is not new. It is, instead, a revealing of that which has been hidden or, more accurately, overlooked.
We are also experiencing a reevaluation of the role that esoteric thought and practice has played in history, opening up new understandings of the world of art, philosophy, politics, and science. The history of modern art has essentially been rewritten, as we more clearly see the impact of esotericism on the art of the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries It is now much more evident that abstraction has always been indelibly linked with the spiritual, and that women ’ s significant participation in spiritualism and other esoteric groups of the mid and late 19th century, such as Theosophy, Anthroposophy and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, generated pioneers of abstraction, such as Georgiana Houghton, Hilma af Klint, and Emma Kunz.
These esoteric and occult religious movements employed visionary techniques and changes in consciousness that prompted rather spectacular artistic responses
Abstraction was born from the fascinating entanglements of science with the spiritual movements of the late nineteenth century: the discoveries of atomic theory, X- rays, and ideas about other dimensions reinforced that the unseen world was brimming with ction and that the real keys to the universe were unable to be apprehended by the naked eye. Underlying the work of af Klint, Mondrian, and Kandinsky is, indeed, a nod to science and empiricism, as they believed that their art, while not representational, was still visually conveying deep physical structures of the universe, while also expressing spiritual truths. The Theosophical thought forms produced by Annie Besant and Charles Leadbetter, that were so influential on the art and theories of Kandinsky, were not meant to be interpreted as creative expressions, or even as symbols. They were presented as truth, as representational of conditions in immaterial dimensions They were empirical proof of phenomena occurring in invisible realms that can still impact us.
This reconsideration of the impact of esotericism in art and history is linked to the wider explosion of interest in women ’ s art. The current impulse toward narratives of discovery and rediscovery of that which has been cast as marginal is currently supporting a necessary, if still insufficient, exploration into, and support of, women ’ s artistic practice. The incredible success of historical correctives such as Katy Hessel’s The Story of Art Without Men (2023), Jennifer Higgie’s The Mirror and the Palette (2021) and more pointedly The Other Side (2023) in which Higgie profiles women artists’ engagement with the spiritual, speak to the desires of the present moment for different artistic voices and a wider range of stories. Cecilia Alemani’s curation of the Giardini’s Central Pavilion and Arsenale at the 2022 Venice Biennale, titled The Milk of Dreams after the children’s book by Leonora Carrington, boasted the largest proportion of women ever shown at that landmark event in the art world’s calendar. The Milk of Dreams also highlighted the enduring entanglement of women, art, and magic, not only as a historical feature, but possibly be named, and even those ancestors not yet born, looking back at us from the future.
Hilma’s Ghost creates beautiful works of art, but it is necessary to understand that this project is so much more than about the paintings. It is, in a way, a manifesto to
collaboration, to becoming more when we work together, to sharing, and to amplifying voices, to supporting others in their creativity. Hilma’s Ghost invites us to take a risk, to build relationships, and relationships are central to this venture, certainly evidenced by the intimacy and trust required to create art characterized by such precision. That intimacy and trust expands outward from Ray and Tegeder, infusing the greater mission of Hilma’s Ghost.
The range of projects and the level of community engagement of this collective is rather breathtaking. Education and community building has been an essential preoccupation for both artists. Over a period extending from 2014 to 2019, Ray produced a number of events in Mumbai and New York designed to increase interdisciplinary and intercultural collaboration. Their programming included discussion and performance, often addressing critical, topical issues including gender, sustainability, and censorship In 2020, Tegeder hosted a number of thought-provoking online artists’ salons which brought together a variety of writers, musicians, and artists to consider diverse, sometimes elusive topics, such as gifts, hotels, secrets, and waiting. Hilma’s Ghost extended outward from these impulses during the pandemic with Ray and Tegeder exploring shared interests in esoteric practice, holding online workshops on automatism, shamanism, sigils, and tarot, as a way to bring people together during a time of seclusion, restriction, and fear, eventually building up a community reach upwards of 10,000 people.
As the world began to open up, Hilma’s Ghost continued to expand their program of public engagement. In 2022, they published Rituals for Grieving in collaboration with Parallax Art Center in Portland, Oregon, a text that is simultaneously delightful, sad, and profound, offering small, concrete ways that we can engage creatively with loss:
Turn off a lamp that has been on for a few hours. Remove the hot bulb and hold it until it cools down. Meditate on a body cooling after death.
Blow up a balloon and release it from a bridge on a windy day
Through the Hilma’s Ghost Swann School of Feminism, Art, and Magic, the pair continues to deliver workshops and virtual courses on tarot, automatic methods, and divination for creatives, supporting other people’s journeys into esotericism alongside their own ambitious artistic and curatorial practice. Dynamism and activity are key features of Hilma’s Ghost exhibitions as well, keeping the spirits and bodies in motion Workshops are incorporated into their curatorial programming, encouraging visitors to unlock their own magical potential, dynamically blending the energies of the gallery
space, moving past detached observation into conjuring the numinous Salons foster another complementary form of interaction, using performance and conversation to elaborate on the themes of the shows.
Exhibitions curated by Hilma’s Ghost are clearly a further extension of the Hilma’s Ghost magical world building project and the artists’ mission to help platform artists and ideas from the spiritual margins The Cosmic Geometries show in 2022 at the EFA Project Space in New York City included 25 artists from a range of generations and backgrounds showing diverse iterations of esoteric abstractions in sculpture, textiles, painting, and ceramic. The layout of the show itself was the result of a magical operation, usingreadings from the ABSTRACT FUTURES tarot deck to determine the layout of the show. Even the color of the walls in the gallery space borrowed from ‘ a Hilma palette,’ channeling their namesake in the process The result was a restrained riot of color, shape, and reconfigured tradition. The inaugural salon exhibition in the newly expanded Carrie Secrist Gallery continues to build upon Hilma’s Ghost’s curatorial exploration of contemporary spiritual abstractions, this time with a focus on midwestern artists.
This current retrospective exhibition, taking place alongside the salon exhibition, represents the story of Hilma’s Ghost’s artistic and esoteric adventures to date, culminating in a capstone style painting fusing moments from their history in addition to their experiments with theorem painting, tarot, and geometrical abstractions. This show prompted Ray and Tegeder to expand into new magical territories, this time working with Chaos Magic techniques and Theosophical thought forms to produce an original and stunning series of works on paper reflecting some of the deepest principles of operative magic: the combination of intention with the imaginal to spark change in the world. Tegeder and Ray were inspired by the artistic and esoteric legacy of Theosophical thought forms, initially theorized by Charles Leadbetter and Annie Besant, who produced a guide to their quirky shapes and colors in the influential 1905 Thought-Forms: A Record of Clairvoyant Investigation. Besant and Leadbetter believed that thoughts and feelings took on material forms of regularized shapes and colors that could be seen by trained clairvoyants. They believed that not only did the color and shape of your thought forms indicate your mood and general spiritual circumstance, but that one ’ s environment could elevate their spiritual condition, which would result in a change in thought form. The idea that colors and shapes were linked to an unseen spiritual realm and that they could be observed was exciting to early 20th century abstract artists, notably Vasily Kandinsky, who worked with the idea of thought forms in his own abstractions. In his 1910 treatise on abstraction, On The Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky argued that these sorts of abstractions had the capacity to uplift the human
Title page of “Thought-Forms” book, first published in 1905
soul in ways that the mere imitation of nature simply could not. Of course, it is evident that af Klint and The Five were similarly motivated just a few years earlier.
The sigilization technique made famous by Austin Osman Spare in the first decades of the 20th century and later adopted by the Chaos Magicians of the 1970s and 80s extends the principle that form and color have independent realities, but in this case, unlike thought forms, the meaning and spirit with which the form is imbued is directly supplied by the mage herself. To create a sigil in this manner, one will write a sentence of intention and then remove vowels and any letters in the sentence which are duplicated. The remaining letters will then be arranged into an abstract design, which will be energetically charged and left to do its work of fulfilling the intention of the creator. For many Chaos Magicians, a critical feature of this practice is in forgetting about the spell, releasing the desire and letting the sigil’s energetic signature burn brightly in the subconscious and out into other dimensions.
For this retrospective, Tegeder and Ray wove 28 spells into sigils; sharp, precise visual enchantments signifying foundational qualities of wholeness, such as Happiness, Comfort, Abundance, Prosperity, all these things that should be so available to everyone. These abstracted desires and intentions were executed on brightly colored Fabriano Murillo sheets, bold reds, blue, black, primarily employing metallic paints to enhance the attractive properties of the lettered sigils. These sigils not only represent expressed desires, they are now the emblems of powerful entities that Tegeder and Ray have invoked and sent forth. These sigils also imprint on the viewer, reinforcing their message, continually sending them back out into the world, thereby allowing us all to help them do their work.
Hilma’s Ghost and the Legacy of Radical Spirits
Although Hilma’s Ghost seems to have been born into a cordial wave of influences which has propelled their reception, this should not in any way diminish the revolutionary values which underlie what Ray and Tegeder bring to this collective. This is an explicitly feminist project to start sowing the seeds of what they explicitly consider to be a utopian vision We know instinctively we are better when we collaborate, when we recognize and remember beings seen and unseen, when we bring everything we have to the table, and commit to working together. The catalyst behind the work of this collective reflects the truly transformational social aspects of magic as being reconsidered within a feminist framework, reflecting the interconnected web of all beings, where our abstract and uncertain futures are truly dependent on each other
Yet, while Ray and Tegeder provide the corporeal vehicles that propel the work of Hilma’s Ghost into materiality, af Klint as the spectral ancestor is no less of a guiding force. Truly making the commitment to work with a spirit and to honor their legacy brings challenges, for when they speak you are compelled to listen. The world today is a far more welcoming place for af Klint’s methods and vision She was far ahead of her time It may be that having found her moment and her vessels, that her spirit’s artistic journey is far from finished.
Installation view with Talismanic Sigil drawings and Cosmic Altar, SECRIST | BEACH, 2024
Abstract Futures Tarot
ABSTRACT FUTURES TAROT
The ABSTRACT FUTURES TAROT project consists of 78 drawings and a tarot deck made from the original drawings inspired by the work of Rider Waite-Smith. The tarot deck is now available in its second edition. Acting as a team, the artists created an abstract deck that holds itself in conversation to the original manifestation by WaiteSmith, which is not only the most popular deck in worldly distribution today but the origin for American tarot Illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith, it harbors the occult belief systems that prevailed in both America and Europe throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and is posited to be the first deck used for divination. More than a century later, Brooklyn-based artists, Tegeder and Ray apply an abstract lens to the cards’ rich symbolism to access their semiotic potential and surface divinatory meanings harnessed through an interpretation of abstract forms.
Previous spread: Installation view of ABSTRACT FUTURES at The Armory Show, Carrie Secrist Gallery, 2021
From left:
II - The High Priestess, X - Wheel of Fortune, XII - The Hanged Man, 2021 Gouache, ink, and colored pencil on Fabriano Murillo paper
17 x 9 75 inches each
ABSTRACT FUTURES Tarot Deck, 2021
Printed tarot deck featuring reproductions of Hilma’s Ghost works from the series of original drawings 2nd Edition
Installation view of Hilma’s Ghost’s ABSTRACT FUTURES deck and drawings at SECRIST | BEACH, Chicago, 2024
Chromagick Drawings
CHROMAGICK DRAWINGS
Chromagick is a series of works on paper created collaboratively by Tegeder and Ray that uses tarot to deepen their exploration of the relationship between ritual, magic, and art through the lens of abstraction. ABSTRACT FUTURES Tarot (2021) served as a genesis for the artists to imagine new ways of expanding upon the tarot’s hidden meanings in this drawing series. Sarah Potter, the associate witch for Hilma’s Ghost, created tarot spreads and interpreted them to create unique messages for each work, which are now the titles of the drawings. Tegeder and Ray also used the card spreads for compositional inspiration by building upon their abstract imagery and symbolism. Can you spot instances of the deck’s symbols for the four suits (cups, wands, swords, pentacles) and characters (page, knight, queen, king)? Drawing from architecture, color systems, and mystical images, the drawings are further embedded with hidden messages through divination and spell work In this way, each drawing acts as a ‘ messenger ’ or ‘guide’ to relay important messages and spiritually uplift the viewer.
Previous page: Installation view of Hilma’s Ghost’s Chromagick drawings at EXPO Chicago, 2022
[RED] Love, Lust, Vitality, 2022
All drawings in the Chromagick series are gouache, ink, and colored pencil on Fabriano Murillo paper
39 x 27 inches
[ORANGE] Creativity, New Opportunities
[YELLOW] Joy, Happiness, Optimism
[GREEN] Prosperity
[BLUE] Emotional healing, Communication
THEOREM PAINTINGS
While looking at the vast collection and rich history of the Hill-Stead Museum in Farmington, CT, the collective zeroed in on a very small object that embodies many of the qualities and topics that they wanted to explore further: a small painting of a fruit basket executed in a popular folk style called theorem painting that was done by either Theodate Pope Riddle's (the founder of the museum) grandmother or great grandmother. As part of their research for this exhibition, Tegeder and Ray participated in channeling and drawing sessions at the Hill-stead, facilitated by Sarah Potter, and engaged in other ritual and divinatory practices to create five new paintings for the show. These new works recover the lost art of theorem painting that was taught in girls' academies throughout New England in the nineteenth century.
Tegeder and Ray have taken an abstract lens to theorem painting to interpret its techniques in a contemporary way, while reclaiming women's work. In this style, women used handmade stencils and numbered formulas to create mostly fruit and floral arrangements, which were highly favored subject matter. The stencil was placed on the velvet and the exposed parts were painted with a stiff brush to create distinct color shapes within a complex compositional schema of both overlapping and interlocking forms. To make their compositions through an automatic process, Hilma's Ghost created a series of written instructional and magical prompts with the help of Potter. Potter randomly drew these prompts out of a large jar while Tegeder and Ray drew. A prompt could be as direct as drawing geometric shapes or as esoteric as envisioning color meditations, tracing invisible symbols, or making a magical elixir to drink. The exercise was to use the element of guided intention to focus the artists' work in order to be fully present with their actions. For the paintings, the artists created over 200 stencils and applied the technique of staining to apply oil paint to the velvet surface through the stencils
Previous page: Installation view of Theorem paintings at SECRIST | BEACH, Chicago, 2024
Automatic Theorem Painting #1, 2022
All works in the Theorem series are oil on cotton velveteen mounted on wooden panels
60 x 48 inches
Automatic Theorem Painting #2, 2022
Automatic Theorem Painting #3, 2022
Automatic Theorem Painting #4, 2022
Automatic Theorem Painting #5, 2022
TALISMANIC SIGIL DRAWINGS
Sharmistha Ray and Dannielle Tegeder merged two concepts from the history of spirituality and magic, “sigils” and “thought forms,” exploring the visualization of thoughts and symbolic representations for desired outcomes in magic Sigils, derived from "sigillum," also signify deities evolving through chaos magic and English artist and occultist Austin Osman Spare’s innovative approach. Ray and Tegeder collaboratively drew 28 charged sigils, representing qualities like Abundance and Love, merging language deconstruction with Spare’s method. Capitalized letters in metallic paint embed into drawings, heightened by 14 paper hues reflecting collaborative consciousness The book Thought-Forms, by Theosophists Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater, delved into drawing thought-forms intuitively from clairvoyant experiences. Many of the illustrations in the book are radically abstract. The book had a major impact on artists like Hilma af Klint and Vassily Kandinsky and countless other artists and is therefore considered a major tome in Western art history. The book is now believed to have given birth to Abstract Modernism Hilma’s Ghost’s fusion of these ideas applies color symbolism and thought-form principles to sigil magic, emphasizing unconscious influence and symbol impact on reality.
Previous page: Installation view of Talismanic Sigil drawings at SECRIST | BEACH, Chicago, 2024
All drawings in the Talismanic Sigil series are 2024, gouache, ink and colored pencil on Fabriano Murillo paper, 20 5 x 22 5 inches each
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TAROT PAINTINGS
The Tarot is a deck of cards that acts as a guidance tool It is made up of archetypes and symbols. Some archetypes include characters like “The Magician” as a symbol for creative energy and “The High Priestess” as a sign for tapping into a higher wisdom. Other symbols include everlasting cosmological signs like “The Sun,” “The Moon,” and “The Star.” Each of these are symbolic of deeper meanings connected to transformations. Along with these archetypes and symbols, color becomes an intrinsic element for communicating intention
Previous page: Installation view of Hilma’s Ghost’s Tarot Paintings at SECRIST | BEACH, Chicago, 2024
The Divine Feminine, 2023 Acrylic and flashe on canvas 96 x 192 inches
Hidden Talismans, 2023 Acrylic and flashe on canvas 72 x 84 inches
COSMIC ALTAR
Cosmic Altar is a painting created by Hilma's Ghost by shuffling and pulling cards from the Major Arcana of their own ABSTRACT FUTURES Tarot, created by the collective in 2021 The original drawings for that tarot deck were directly adapted into the design for this painting. Within COSMIC ALTAR, an earthy palette of greens and browns represent the material and physical plane. A palette of purples, blues, and indigos are colors that are associated with spiritual wisdom. Cumulatively, this collection of cosmological and celestial symbols within the painting indicate a space of transformation, one in which the Individual seeks their higher purpose.
This monumental artwork inspired a winning proposal for a major public commission to be realized in New York City later this year.
Previous page: Installation view of Hilma’s Ghost’s Cosmic Altar at SECRIST | BEACH, Chicago, 2024
Opposite page: Detail
Cosmic Altar, 2023
Acrylic and flashe on canvas 96 x 192 inches
Hilma's Ghost, a feminist artist collective, was co-founded by Brooklyn-based artists Dannielle Tegeder and Sharmistha Ray in 2020. The collective seeks to address existing art historical gaps by curtivating a global network of women, nonbinary, and trans practitioners whose work addresses spirituality. Hilma af Klint's groundbreaking exhibition at the Guggenheim in 2018 served as a reckoning for art history's blindspots, especially for women artists considered too 'mystical' for the conservative art world. Named after af Klint, Hilma's Ghost believes that western heteropatriarchal societies maintain a false binary between spirituality and science. This bias serves to overlook womxn artists whose explorations of ancient and pre-modern knowledge systems is a source of personal strength and aesthetic innovation Hilma's Ghost acts as a restorative project that uplifts these voices and makes them visible.
Hilma's Ghost has run online programs and free public workshops since their launch in 2020. These programs have attracted hundreds of artists and other spiritual practitioners from across the globe on subjects ranging from shamanism, automatic drawing, to sigil making In 2021, Hilma's Ghost had their first artistic collaboration with ABSTRACT FUTURES Tarot, which was shown at The Armory Show at the Carrie Secrist Gallery booth from September 9-12, 2021.
Sharmistha Ray is an artist, art critic, and educator. For two decades, their work has explored subjective experience through the lens of queerness, language, and memory. Ray's core practice consists of drawing, but also includes painting, sculpture, video installation, and photography. They have exhibited their work in solo exhibitions in Mumbai, New York, and Singapore, and shown in group exhibitions and art fairs in the U.S. and abroad. They are the recipient of a Joan Mitchell MFA Grant, and received their MFA in Painting from Pratt Institute. Currently, they teach in the MFA programs at Parsons School of Design and School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University.
Dannielle Tegeder is an artist and professor at The City University of New York at Lehman College. For the past fifteen years, her work has explored abstraction through the lens of systems, architecture, and utopianism. While the core of her practice is paintings and drawings, she also works in large-scale installation, mobiles, video, sound, and animation and has done a number of collaborations with composers, dancers, and writers In March 2020 Tegeder founded The Pandemic Salon, a community-centric project intended to dismantle the hierarchical structures of institutional discussion, which showcases topics related to the pandemic by bringing together creative minds in an informal, online environment that has connected over 600 participants from 40 countries."
Selections from the Artist’s Library
Bashkoff, Tracey, Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future, (Guggenheim, 2018)
Besant, Annie and Leadbeater, C.W., Thought Forms, (Sacred Bones Books, 2020)
Cassel, Anna, The Saga of the Rose, (Bokförlaget Stolpe, 2023)
Duncan, Michael, Another World: The Transcendental Painting Group, (DelMonico Books, 2021)
Elizabeth, S., The Art of The Occult: A Visual Sourcebook for the Modern Mystic, (White Lion Publishing, 2020)
Gabriel, Mary, Ninth Street Women, (Back Bay Books, 2018)
Hale, Amy, Sex Magic: Diagrams of Love, Ithell Colquhoun, (Palgrave Macmillian, 2022)
Hessel, Katy, The Story of Art Without Men, (Norton Press, 2023)
Higgie, Jennifer, The Other Side: A Story of Women in Art and the Spirit World, (Pegasus Books, 2024)
Hundley, Jessica, Plant Magick: The Library of Esoterica, (Taschen, 2022)
Hundley, Jessica, and Grossman, Pam, Witchcraft: The Library of Esoterica, (Taschen, 2021)
Kandinsky, Wassily, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, (Echo Point Books & Media, 2020)
Lipp, Deborah, The Way of Four, (Crossed Crow Books, 2023)
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985, (Abbeville Press, 1986)
Nochlin, Linda, Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? (Thames & Hudson, 1971)
Otto, Elizabeth, Haunted Bauhaus: Occult Spirituality, Gender Fluidity, Queen Identities, and Radical Politics, (The MIT Press, 2019)
Ronnberg, Ami, and Martin, Kathleen, The Book of Symbols: Reflections on Archetypal Images, (Taschen, 2020)
Rubinstein, Raphael, and Bause Rubinstein, Heather, Schema: World as Diagram, (Marlborough Press, 2023)
Sutcliff, Jamie, Magic: Documents of Contemporary Art, (Whitechapel Gallery, The MIT Press, 2021)
Valiente, Doreen, The Rebirth of Witchcraft, (Crowood Press, 1989)
Voss, Julia, Hilma af Klint: A Biography, (The University of Chicago Press, 2022)
