The Other Side: Jennifer Higgie in conversation
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Culture Club and Roe River Books are delighted to partner with Books Upstairs in welcoming the esteemed writer Jennifer Higgie to Dublin for an ‘in conversation’ event. Jennifer will discuss her latest critically acclaimed work, ‘The Other Side: A Journey into Women, Art and the Spirit World’.
THE OTHER SIDE is the first major work of art history to focus on women artists and their engagement with the spirit world, by one of the foremost art writers at work today.
In THE OTHER SIDE, we explore the lives and work of a group of extraordinary women, from the twelfth-century mystic, composer and artist Hildegard of Bingen to the nineteenth-century English spiritualist Georgiana Houghton, whose paintings swirl like a cosmic Jackson Pollock; the early twentieth-century Swedish artist, Hilma af Klint, who painted with the help of her spirit guides and whose recent exhibition at New York’s Guggenheim broke all attendance records; Ithell Colquhoun, whose estate of more than 5,000 works recently entered the Tate gallery collection. While the individual work of these artists is unique, the women loosely shared the same goal: to communicate with, and learn from, other dimensions.
Weaving in and out of these myriad lives, sharing her own memories of otherworldly experiences, Jennifer Higgie discusses the solace of ritual, the gender exclusions of art history, the contemporary relevance of myth, the boom in alternative ways of understanding the world and the impact of spiritualism on feminism and contemporary art. A radical reappraisal of a marginalised group of artists, THE OTHER SIDE is an intoxicating blend of memoir, biography and art history.
JENNIFER HIGGIE is a writer who studied painting at art school in Australia before moving to London. Previously the editor of frieze magazine, she was also the presenter of Bow Down, a podcast about women in art history. She is a screenwriter, the editor of a collection of writings on art and humour, The Artist’s Joke, a novel, Bedlam, a children’s book, There’s Not One, and The Mirror and the Palette: Rebellion, Revolution and Resilience – 500 Years of Women’s Self-Portraits.
Praise for The Other Side:
‘The Other Side lit up my brain. A radical, fascinating exploration of art and the otherworldly, Higgie is an expert and erudite guide in this brilliant reclamation of female artists’
– SINEAD GLEESON, author of CONSTELLATIONS
‘Wonderful . . . Higgie guides us through overlooked stories from the history of art and reveals the insights into the nature of imagination which reside there. Illuminating in every sense of the word’
– JOHN HIGGS, author of WILLIAM BLAKE VS THE WORLD
‘the strength of Higgie’s book is that it is not merely another treatise on the wrongs suffered by women artists throughout history. This tale is about something much larger than grievance. There is a vein of optimism and wonder running through the text. The women whom Higgie profiles created, and they did so despite cultural scorn.’
– MARY GABRIEL, The New York Times
