One Eye Sees the Other Feels: Vivienne Roberts Projects

Featuring contemporary artists:

Melissa Alley, Jo Lewis, Hannah Luxton, Olivia Streeton

With historical works by:

Ithell Colquhoun, Louise Janin, Grace Pailthorpe, Henri Pfeiffer

www.viviennerobertsprojects.com

Taking its title from a quote by Paul Klee, one eye sees the other feels, is an exhibition that considers painting as a multisensory practice in which feeling is as central to artistic creation as seeing. Bringing together contemporary and historical works, the exhibition examines how artists have used mediumistic, psychic, and visionary approaches, including automatism, trance and meditation, to access forms of knowledge beyond ordinary perception.

The artists featured in the exhibition approach painting as both a creative and receptive act, occupying the role of channeller as much as originator. Here, the support becomes a site of transmission and transformation, where the flow of conscious intention merges with presences that appear to emerge from elsewhere: the subconscious, dreams, ancestral memory, spirit communication, cosmic energies, or intuitive connections to the natural world.

This understanding of artistic receptivity resonates with the visionary thought of Paul Klee, whose writings and paintings maintain an enduring dialogue with metaphysical and creative processes. In 1916, he wrote in his diary the following passage:

Everything Faustian is alien to me. I place myself at a remote starting point of creation whence I state a priori formulas for men, beasts, plants, stones and the elements, and for all the whirling forces. A thousand questions subside as if they had been solved. Neither orthodoxies nor heresies exist there. The possibilities are too endless, and the belief in them is all that lives creatively in me. […] Art imitates creation.

Klee’s insights resonate with the exhibition’s historical works which trace a lineage of artists who explored altered states of consciousness and expanded sensory awareness throughout the twentieth century. Associated with movements spanning Spiritualism, Theosophy, and Surrealism, these artists developed innovative visual languages that privileged sensation, embodiment, and psychic receptivity alongside seeing. Their presence within the exhibition creates a dialogue across generations while shining a light on figures, particularly women artists, whose contributions have often been marginalised within dominant art historical narratives.

Drawing upon spiritual and scientific frameworks including mesmerism, spiritualism, theosophy, alchemy and archetypal imagery, one eye sees the other feels reflects on how invisible energies can be made tangible through gesture, ritual, and material process. The exhibition proposes an expanded understanding of perception in which seeing, hearing, and feeling, or, in psychic terms, clairvoyance, clairaudience, and clairsentience, function as interwoven threads of awareness. At a time marked by technological saturation, ecological uncertainty, and renewed spiritual searching, the exhibition reconsiders visionary and mediumistic art as a vital and continuing aspect of contemporary practice rather than a historical anomaly.

Co-curators Vivienne Roberts (@viviennerobertsprojects) and Vivienne Roberts (@mediumisticart) share more than a name. Developed through ongoing conversations over the past year, the exhibition emerged from a shared fascination with artists whose practices are guided by intuition, sensitivity, and attunement to unseen emanations, alongside a deep respect for their command of material and the painting process.

Vivienne Roberts (@mediumisticart) is a curator, writer, and researcher whose work focuses on the history of mediumistic and visionary art. Her most recent touring exhibition, Tranceducers: Art of Visionaries, Mediums and Automatists (London, St Ives, 2025-26), continues her exploration of the intersections between creativity, spirituality, and the invisible. For nine years, she served as curator and archivist at The College of Psychic Studies, where she oversaw a significant collection of spirit-inspired art, photography, and artefacts and curated several major exhibitions.

A common thread runs through the art exhibited with Vivienne Roberts Projects: poetic imagery - something these artists seem to share with Paul Klee. It is art that is timeless, poetic and personal, characterised by a strong line, whimsical and impish humour, a dialogue with nature, organic or biomorphic imagery, sensitivity to colour gradation, a meditative quality, and a developed independence from realism.