Discover the ‘spirit drawings’ by a 19th-century British woman that rewrite art history

In conjunction with the major exhibition Kandinsky at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Invisible Friends is a rare Sydney showing of ‘spirit drawings’ created in the 1860s and ‘70s by Georgiana Houghton (1814–84).

Recently ‘rediscovered’ by art history, Houghton’s outwardly abstract artworks – among the most astonishing images of her time – have now assured her place as one of the most radical of spiritualist artists and a precursor of the abstraction to come.

Houghton was a prominent figure of the early spiritualist movement in Victorian England, which played a significant role in 19th-century culture. Spiritualism is a belief system that centres around communication with the spirits of the dead, often through people known as mediums.

A trained artist, Houghton was also a medium. When painting, she sought to express the connection between the visible world and the invisible spirit realm, considering the ‘manifestation first, and art second’. With her hand guided by those she called her ‘invisible friends’ – long-dead artists, family, friends and angels – she created intricate, swirling, mesmeric images, only a few of which survive today.

This exhibition of her watercolours, rarely seen outside their home in the chapel of the Victorian Spiritualists’ Union, Melbourne, is presented alongside an exhibition of works by Vasily Kandinsky (1866–1944) to reveal the significant role spiritualism played in early modernism.