Georgiana Houghton

Georgiana Houghton (1814–March 1884) was a British artist and spiritualist medium.

Biography

Houghton was born in 1814 in Las Palmas, on Spain's Canary Islands,

Houghton became associated with the spirit photographer Frederick Hudson to sell reproductions of his photographs.

In 1882, Houghton published Chronicles of the Photographs of Spiritual Beings and Phenomena Invisible to the Material Eye. The book included alleged spirit photographs from Hudson and other photographers featuring mediums such as Agnes Guppy-Volckman, Stainton Moses and spiritualists Alfred Russel Wallace and William Howitt. The photographs in the book were criticized by magic historian Albert A. Hopkins. He noted that the photographs looked dubious and that such images could be produced by fraudulent methods.

Houghton died in March 1884

Artistic career

Georgiana Houghton started creating her spirit images first by drawing and eventually started experimenting with watercolors. Her earliest known works depicted extremely stylized flowers and fruits. Following a period of formal experimentation, Houghton developed a completely abstract or non-objective style, at least 40 years before Kandinsky, Malevich, Houghton described the apparently non-referential shapes and colors in her paintings as a system of “sacred symbolism," In November 2018, 17 paintings were displayed as part of "World Receivers" exhibition along with Hilma af Klint and Emma Kunz, then six were exhibited at Wilhelm Hack Museum's "Floral Fantasies" exhibition in March 2019. In 2021, as part of Centre Pompidou's "Women in Abstraction" exhibition, then this exhibition was presented at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in late 2021/early 2022, Both these exhibitions were in a virtual platform due to the pandemic. In 2022, her work was included in the thematic exhibit Corps orbite for the 59th Venice Biennale. The Victorian Spiritualists' Union, in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia have 35 of Houghton's original paintings permanently on display, and regularly loan the collections for exhibiting around the world. In 2020, the VSU published a book on Houghton's works

Publications Chronicles of the Photographs of Spiritual Beings and Phenomena Invisible to the Material Eye (1882) Evenings at Home in Spiritual Séance (1882)