The Creative Occult: An Art Seance with the Five is a 3-week psychic experiment and workshop in intuitive art-making and creative mediumship. Alongside Pointy Hat Press co-founders, Caitlyn Barone & Kristin Lisenby, participants will gather around the virtual candle for a collective psychic experiment using art as a doorway into the creative unconscious. Join the art séance here. Questions? Send a DM or leave a comment for Kristin and Caitlyn below.
The spirit world has long been a muse for those with creative hearts, including the poet William Butler Yeats and Tarot artist Pamela Coleman Smith. The writer Sylvia Plath used Ouija to inspire her pen, while the mystic William Blake recorded his clairvoyant visions via automatic drawing rituals. In Hilma af Klint’s art collective, the Five, five women infused their creative process with a range of Spiritualist methods, a move that inspired over 100 finished paintings.
For the Five, art-making was ritualistic, a ritual to map the unseen.
Born into a Swedish naval family in 1862, Hilma af Klint spent her younger years on the Swedish island of Adelsö. It was there, among the wilds of her childhood, that Hilma forged a close relationship with plants and the natural world, a passion that fueled her long and winding creative life.
When the af Klint family left Adelsö for Stockholm, Hilma began studying art and design at university. At age 20, she was accepted into Sweden’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts, where she focused on landscape and botanical drawing, and graduated with honors in 1887. Shortly after graduation, Hilma began her professional career as an artist, painting portraits and landscapes for people in Stockholm.
While Hilma relied on conventional commissioned work to pay bills and support her lifestyle, privately, she was deeply immersed in recording and experimenting with her own unique artistic style, combining her interests in Spiritualism, mediumship, the occult, and the teachings of occultists such as Rudolf Steiner and Madame Blavatsky. Hilma referred to her private, mystical art-making as her ‘great work,’ and eventually she teamed up with fellow artists Anna Cassel, Cornelia Cederberg, Sigrid Hedman, and Mathilda Nilsson to create the Spiritualist Art group De Fem, or The Five.
Hilma af Klint
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