The Other Side: A Journey into Women, Art and the Spirit World by Jennifer Higgie

The Other Side: A Journey into Women, Art and the Spirit World by Jennifer Higgie

I’ve been slowly reading Jennifer Higgie’s The Other Side since my sister gave it to me in April – and finished it last Friday in an ecstatic frenzy.

Initially I read slowly because, as the subtitle ‘a journey’ suggests, it meanders a little, in and out of Jennifer Higgie’s own life and engagement with the artists she discusses. Like so many of the books I’m most interested in these days, it’s a mix of memoir, biography and (art) history, which can make for an unwieldy form. Higgie opens:

In 1996, I went to a Greek island to write a novel about a nineteenth-century fairy painter. Twenty-five years later, I returned to write about women artists and the spirit world.

This is Higgie’s journey. She travels through times of transition, including the pandemic and her two sojourns in Greece – and through the lives of dozens of women artists who’ve sought, been inspired by and made art about their direct encounters with the spirit realm. As far as I know from my reading, Higgie is doing something brand new here: scoping out a vast terrain of women artists and the spirit world for the first time in one book. That she gathers so many artists, mostly from the last 150 years, in one multilayered, interwoven narrative is one of her book’s many achievements and great pleasures.

She ranges from Hildegard von Bingen, Georgiana Houghton, Madame Blavatsky and Annie Besant to Hilma af Klint, Ithell Colquhoun, Lenore Tawney, Niki de Saint Phalle, Liliane Lijn – and Ngamaru Bidu, Yikartu Bumba, Kumpaya Girgirba, Thelma Judson, Yuwali Janice Nixon, Reena Rogers, Karnu Nancy Taylor and Ngalangka Nola Taylor whose magnificent Yarrkalpa (Hunting Ground, 2013) featured in ‘Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters’ at the National Museum of Australia in 2017.

And this just begins to suggest Higgie’s scope, which also includes mythology, theology, science, mysticism, occult practices, gardens and plants. In the prologue Higgie describes her mode well, its looseness, ambition, complexity and consequence:

This book is, in no way, conclusive; rather, it’s a collection of reflections and memories exploring this particular historical moment from a personal perspective. It grew from my fascination with the connections between women and the spirit worlds in both the art of the past and that of the present, and how they intertwine with healing and nature – literally and symbolically – and what they might be able to teach us about new ways of shaping the future.

Trained as an artist in Canberra, Higgie went to London in the 1990s on an art scholarship and stayed, spending two decades writing for the contemporary art magazine frieze and then becoming a freelance writer. She includes her own experiences as an artist and with the spirit world; exhibitions and performances she’s written about and/or been involved in; and conversations she’s had with several of the artists whose work she discusses.

The Other Side was seeded by Higgie’s experience of the pandemic:

the enforced solitude made something very clear. I wanted to return to a place of speculation, to open myself up to new ways of inhabiting the world. I wanted to embrace doubt, nurture curiosity, write with no conclusion. The precariousness of it all – financial, emotional, intellectual – scared me. What I longed for was a kind of re-enchantment – something that art is very good at.

I’ve been thinking and reading about art and ‘re-enchantment’ for a long time, including in Suzi Gablik’s The Reenchantment of Art (1991), but for some reason Higgie’s book has particularly seized me. Which may be related to this moment and where I am in my own writing life, but I suspect it also has to do with the way Higgie addresses this subject and the fact that she’s focused on women.

Because perhaps what most impressed me about The Other Side were the many nuanced and energising ways Higgie has found to discuss – to find language for – not only a practice which has been marginalised, demonised and silenced for centuries (direct communion with spirit by women), but subjects (the women who commune) who throughout history have been actively persecuted, hunted, burnt and murdered for it. The Witchcraft Act was only repealed in Great Britain in 1951. But witch hunts remain a global problem, to the extent that in 2020 the Pope declared 10 August as World Day against Witch Hunts.

As a lifelong explorer of this realm, what particularly thrilled me reading this book was the word ‘spirit’ used as if it’s not an accusation. Which is how I’ve always felt it to be when I’ve dared to utter it in the wrong circles – which are surprisingly ubiquitous and hard to pick, even among ostensibly open-minded, curious creative types.

This is something Higgie addresses most directly in her last chapter, ‘Into the Ether’, which opens:

I’m seated next to a gallery director at dinner. She asks me what I am writing, and I tell her about this book. She frowns, and says: ‘But surely the old superstitions are what women have needed to shake off? It was the old ways of thinking that kept them in their place.’ It’s a fair question. I take a moment to answer her.

This moment lasts for three pages.

And then Higgie proffers her brief and perfect reply. Which concludes the book.

And sent me straight back to the beginning. Because of course this entire book is an answer to the gallery director’s question – and to all the questions and accusations so many of these artists faced.

‘To trust in art is to trust in mystery,’ writes Higgie in her prologue. ‘The suggestion that no serious artist would attempt to communicate with, or about, the dead or other realms falls apart with the most perfunctory scrutiny. Across the globe, the spirit world has shaped culture for millennia.

Despite the fact that I’ve long known many of the artists Higgie includes, reading this book felt like coming home. In gathering all these women together Higgie has told and given weight to a hidden history whose time has come in so many ways. The signs are everywhere, in contemporary art, exhibitions, reclaimed histories, the explosion of interest in myths, magic, paganism, tarot, astrology, and so much more, including the Masters in Cultural Astronomy and Astrology at the University of Wales and the new Masters of Magic and Occult Science at Exeter University which starts in September 2024.

Read The Other Side! I highly recommend it. It feels like an act of generosity and grace - and of courage, too.

Postscript: It’s been over a year since I last blogged here and said I’d be writing next about Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You and Sheila Heti’s Pure Colour. Despite my ambivalence about both novels, I wanted to write about them because I was struck by how explicitly they’re concerned with spirit realms. And how this seemed to be necessitated by their engagement with ecological, social, economic and political crises.

Beautiful World explores various sorts of spiritual longing and possible containers for them, from friendship and art to traditional religion (one of the four main characters is an avid, church-going Catholic). And Pure Colour is thoroughly otherworldly, directly invoking spirit, God and the gods. Its protagonist metamorphoses into a leaf after her father’s death and is mysteriously joined with him in the cosmos where they play on the rings of Saturn.

These novels seemed to open the possibility of blogging about spiritual realms, which I’ve been keen to do for some time. But they just didn’t compel me enough to finish the blog.

And then I read The Other Side … and here I am, for the first time since August 2022.