Amy Hale on Ithell Colquhoun, Celticity and Surrealism

e-interview Rupert White

You're an American citizen who came to Cornwall in the 90's to study aspects of Celtic identity as part of a PhD with UCLA. How and why did you first become interested in Cornwall and Celticity?

I was grabbed by the Celtic bug as an impressionable youth and even though my research has had many twists and turns, I feel as though I’m still exploring different facets of the same things I have always loved. I was interested in the whole Romantic Celtic thing as a teen, particularly loving the dreadful scholarship of the nineteenth century about ancient Arthurian solar cults and Druids. See, I really haven’t changed much!

I very quickly learned that the popular vision of the Celts as dreamy Otherworld visionaries, while enticing, is not even remotely the story of the Celtic peoples who have been so indelibly shaped by colonialism and marginalization, but wow, how it continues to sell!  My BA was in Anthropology, and I went to an Honors College in Florida that required significant original research for a BA thesis. It was really more like a Master’s degree.  I did ethnographic fieldwork in Ireland for several months in 1989 looking at how Irish mythology and ideas about the Celts was influencing Ireland as the EU was in a formative stage. Cutting my teeth on Ireland was great since there is so much documentation about the historical development of Irish Celtic identities and Irish ethnonationalism, but I honestly never felt any particular connection with Ireland, although I do love it because Ireland is pretty awesome.

Cornwall was different. I was doing my PhD in the Folklore department at UCLA where I was then academically grounded in a very traditional Medievalist and linguistically based Celtic Studies concentration, which didn’t really fit my interests in identity, politics, and economies. I already knew a bit about the cultural politics prior to my first visit to Cornwall in 1994. I spent that summer doing fieldwork to help shape ideas for my thesis and I was so passionately moved by the stories I heard and what I observed.  I stayed with Cornish language speakers and cultural activists who taught me about Cornish history, the troubled economy and the inequities that Cornish people face. I felt then and I feel now that it’s an important story to tell.

As an American incomer I didn’t have the Cornish/English cultural baggage and the dominant cultural narratives about Cornwall to shed, and as a result I think bring a different perspective to that dynamic. I relocated to Cornwall in 1995 and became very immersed in the culture and in Cornish cultural activism. Even though I am based in Atlanta now, Cornwall is still central to my work and has never ceased to interest and amaze me.  

You were based in the Cornish Studies dept of Exeter University. It's striking that there is very little in the Cornish Studies literature on visual art and artists. In your Colquhoun book you describe it as 'an uncomfortable topic for scholars of Cornwall'. Can you explain this?

The goal of Cornish Studies as a field, and one that I unequivocally support, is to re-center the Cornish people in their own story and to explore Cornish history, economics, and culture (and in the days of Charles Thomas, biology) from a Cornish perspective. Cornish Studies, like other area studies, aims to shed light on the historical contexts that have created the conditions of Cornish economic and cultural marginality. I still think this is a critically important project, and rather than having it forced into retreat into a corner of the University of Exeter, I think it needs to see more investment, and expansion because it is still vitally relevant.

But I digress. You are right that the visual arts and the groups at Newlyn and St. Ives have not had much exploration within Cornish Studies. Part of that is because of the nature of those movements, and some because of the specialization of a somewhat small group of scholars which has traditionally been more focused on history and politics. The art movements in Newlyn and St. Ives generally lacked Cornish inclusion or influence, and in the case of the Newlyn School the Cornish portrayed as subjects in the paintings were very romanticized.  

Those art movements arose when much of the native Cornish economy had collapsed and we start to see the rise of tourism and what we might call creative economies start to take center stage as economic drivers in Cornwall. It’s a sore spot with Cornish Studies scholars (and others of course!), because while these might reasonably form part of an economic strategy, as a primary economic strategy we have seen where they don’t translate into prosperity and stability for the majority of Cornish residents. I will say, though, that although the idea of creative economies has had some justifiable backlash and some excellent critique of late, there is a lot of fabulous and significant Cornish creativity in the arts out there that is very, very worthy of scholarly attention.  

The tremendous success of Mark Jenkin’s Bait comes to mind.  

This relates to the discussion of Celticity in your book. Many artists (eg Gauguin), writers (eg DH Lawrence) and occultists (eg Mathers and Crowley) were rather besotted with the Romantic idea of the Celt, and Colquhoun was not different. Or was there something unique about her understanding? 

Even though Colquhoun had an extremely romantic sensibility about her love of the Celts, she really did understand and acknowledge the political dimension and the colonialism at the core of it, and I think that does differentiate her somewhat.

Yeats was a primary influence and the Irish writers who she loved certainly had a strong political commitment to their work that impacted her own interest in Celtic cultures. Colquhoun wasn’t actively involved in what we call the Cornish movement, but she did get it, and I think she would have believed herself to be an ally. She believed that Cornish culture was distinct and that it was important to preserve it.  

Having said that, she was deeply anti-modernist and she probably would have preferred Celtic cultures to be preserved in aspic. She also firmly believed that there was a Celtic cultural substrata through all of Britain which certainly would have tempered any nascent activism.

To what extent was she able to engage with Cornish revivalists, activists and historians like eg James Whetter? She must have been disappointed she wasn't asked to become a bard of the Cornish Gorseth...

Her engagement with Cornish activists and historians such as William Paynter and Hugh Miners was significant but not extensive, and mostly about areas that were of interest to her, such as Witchcraft. James Whetter was a fascinating character (for the uninitiated, Whetter was the founder of the Cornish Nationalist Party, which was a different party now considered slightly to the Right of Mebyon Kernow), and at one point he was interested in having her write for his magazine, An Baner Kernewek, but I don’t believe the relationship progressed much.  

I think her intersections with Whetter came about because he was engaged with Colin Murray’s Celtic flavored spiritual group the Golden Section Order, to the extent that he was publishing ads in the back of their newsletters and seeking support from Murray’s constituency.  He was clearly trying to inspire folks who had an interest in Celtic nativist spirituality, and he and Colquhoun might have found common ground there.  

While Colquhoun clearly knew about Cornish revivalist activities, there is no real evidence that she engaged in that milieu at all. I would think that being rebuffed by the Gorseth may have taken the wind out of her sails in that respect, but she was very actively involved in a type of Druidry that was seen by the Welsh and Cornish Gorseth as a cultural imposition, appropriating Celtic institutions for very different ends. There was an active conflict going on in the early 1960s between the English and Celtic Druidic/Bardic orders, and she was on the wrong side of it.  It’s hard to know how this may have impacted any potential interest she may have had in the Cornish movement.

I would say that a middle ground for her was her interest in Denys Val Baker’s Cornish Review, to which she contributed in 1971.

Thinking about your book more specifically, can you say something about the title? Where did this come from?

"Genius of the Fern Loved Gully" is a line from that absolutely wonderful section in the opening of The Living Stones, where she offers thanks to the Spirit of Lamorna: "O rooted here without time, I bathe in you; genius of the fern loved gully, do not molest me; and may you remain forever unmolested."  I think it beautifully expresses her animism and her deep love and respect of Lamorna. Of course when choosing the title of the book we liked the many layered meanings of the phrase.