A friend told me about this exhibition when I was in London and highly recommended that I visit, suggesting that it was completely up my street. Emma Kunz was a clairvoyant and spiritual healer who used a pendulum to create huge geographic drawings which she used to assist in her healing, referencing these drawings as ‘portals’…. Well, this is indeed right up my street! Completely! Having taken a 3 year hiatus from ceramics to pursue a healing and clairvoyant path myself, this exhibition spoke more profoundly to me than anything I have seen in some time. Without question there is something to these drawings. I could not tear myself away, I stayed at the serpentine for 3 hours, finding myself drawn into working in a healing capacity with these images, zooming between rooms in strange sequences seeking and seemingly knowing which drawing should follow the proceeding one (this I found all the more interesting as Emma Kunz never dated any of her drawings or provided any information, when asked to describe them she would say that they were “shape and form expressed as measurement, rhythm, symbol and transformation of figure and principle”). I found this to be the oddest experience I’ve had at an exhibition . My impulse and instinct to work with these drawings in a way unfamiliar to a gallery context felt strange. I was responding to this exhibition from the perspective of a healer more than an artist. I was magnetically drawn to certain intersections in the images, my hands hovering, my fingers drawing energy from various points. This was a very personal experience which felt at odds with the ever changing influx of vigilant invigilators, one of whom told me off for touching the glass.
These powerful artworks find me at a time when recent spiritual events have brought me into an unanticipated place. I needed to interact with these drawings, that this work exists I found breathtaking, even more so that the work is retrospective. Kudos to the Serpentine Gallery for bringing this artist to a modern day audience….and especially to me.
I loved the added touch with this exhibition of the creation of the stone benches, importing large chunks of the healing rock AION A that Emma Kunz discovered. The simple form of these benches summed up by co-curator Christodoulos Panayiotou, “I shall add only a series of benches for Emma Kunz. I see them as viewing devices. They shall allow vision rather than being seen”…. for this he referenced Paul Klee- “Didn’t Feuerbach say: For the understanding of a picture, a chair is needed? Why a chair? To prevent the legs, as they tire, from interfering with the mind”. As crystal is also an amplifier it will indeed help allow vision 🙂
