The Donnelly River Residency Exhibition 

Note from the Artist:

My time at the Donnelly River Verandah Residency marked a turning of the inner tide — a moment when my usual devotion to the studio and printmaking’s controlled alchemy opened into a wilder, more embodied practice. Immersed in that forested silence, I began working in situ with botanical inks, letting place itself guide the gesture. Returning home, I gathered those impressions into an essay that traces this shift in method and spirit. It will appear in M/C Journal, the double-blind peer-reviewed Media and Culture journal, in 2026.

​

​Ashe, K. (2025). The Mantic Stain of Experience: Surrealist Automatism and the Irreproducible. M/C Journal Forthcoming 2026

 

The Mantic Stain of Experience:
Surrealist Automatism and the Irreproducible

​

By Dr. Kelsey Ashe​​

​

Introduction: Experience, Ritual, and Irreproducibility in a Post-AI Image Culture

​

The Surrealist movement of the early twentieth century positioned ‘irrational’ experience, such as intuitive or unconscious knowledge at the core of creative innovation. To bypass the constraints of rational thought, artists developed techniques of automatism, including écriture automatique (automatic writing), frottage (rubbings), fumage (smoke impressions), and decalcomania (chance transfers). Max Ernst is credited with popularising decalcomania in his ambiguous landscapes, but the technique was expanded by artists such as Ithell Colquhoun and Leonora Carrington who approached the process through their own imaginative and philosophical frameworks.

​

The Surrealist artists saw its potential to allow accidental formations to co-author the image. In Colquhoun’s essay of 1939 The Mantic Stain, she describes this chance mark-making as akin to divination, where blots and spills functioned as portals to visionary knowledge.  She emphasised the material unpredictability and embodied nature of this art practice as fundamentally experiential and therefore central to a reading of Surrealist automatism.

​

This essay extends that lineage into contemporary practice, examining how experience — framed phenomenologically and materially — continues to shape artmaking today. Drawing from my own engagement with automatism, I argue that working in a state of flow and in dialogue with seasonal thresholds such as solstices and equinoxes generates artworks that are irreproducible events: performative encounters in which light, atmosphere, and environment collaborate with chance to create singular aesthetic outcomes. These works exist not as static objects but as embodied records of lived experience, inseparable from the conditions of their making.

​

Foregrounding the experiential also provides a response to contemporary debates on artificial intelligence and image reproducibility. As alluring as the use of AI might be, automatism offers a means of resistance to safeguard against its superficiality.  Its practice is grounded in material accident and environmental aura which resists the homogenising tendencies of algorithmic image culture.  In this sense, Surrealist automatism offers both historical precedent and contemporary relevance: a model of art-making that values presence over digitised reproduction.

​

This framework is best understood through phenomenology and Karen Barad’s concept of intra-action: whereas AI operates through pre-coded datasets and algorithmic recombination, automatist practices emerge from entangled encounters in which artist, matter, and environment co-constitute one another (Barad 33). Such processes cannot be replicated because they enact becoming rather than reproduction.

This paper argues for the continued relevance of Surrealist women’s legacies as frameworks for rethinking artmaking as experiential encounter. I situate my own experiments within this lineage, proposing a synthesis of automatist practice and seasonal ritual as a way of reclaiming the irreducible in contemporary art. The ‘mantic stain of experience’ names this exchange - a process in which accident, aura, and time coalesce, and where the artwork insists on its singularity as a lived and marvellous encounter.  André Breton described the marvellous as unusual happenings that disrupt the everyday to reveal a deeper strangeness already latent in reality (Breton 15).  In revisiting and extending these traditions, I suggest that the Surrealist pursuit of chance and the irrational offer an alternative to the reproducibility and disembodiment of digital AI culture.

Automatism and the Surrealist Inheritance

 

Surrealism’s early theorists defined automatism as a deliberate suspension of rational control (the planning, analysing and reductive mind) to allow involuntary processes (the generative unconscious mind) to guide the production of art.  André Breton’s 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism championed a “pure automatism” where automatic writing was described as “dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason” (Breton 87). Later Breton gave precise instructions for decalcomania using “black gouache on a sheet of shiny paper….[to] express yourself in the most personal and valuable way” (Breton 221).  Visual artists including Max Ernst, Óscar Domínguez and André Masson incorporated these ideas into experimental methods aimed at bypassing pre-planned composition, deliberately reframing artmaking away from the pursuit of technical mastery and instead toward recording a ‘pure’ encounter with matter and chance.

 

Although Max Ernst’s experiments with automatism were highly influential, it was women Surrealists who expanded these methods into more embodied, ecological, and spiritual registers. Whitney Chadwick observes in Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement that figures such as Leonora Carrington and Ithell Colquhoun resisted the strict theoretical limits of pure automatism set out by Breton and other leaders of the movement.  Colquhoun described decalcomania as a ‘mantic stain’, charged with visionary potential and a technique that could provide a consistent method of linking the surreal with the hermetic both philosophically and technically. For her, the accidental mark was not merely suggestive of unconscious imagery but a site where world, spirit, and imagination intersected. 

 

Though the Surrealists celebrated the “marvellous,” they rejected overt forms of spiritualism.  Within the British Group, E.L.T. Mesens grew hostile toward theosophical or occult frameworks, resulting in Colquhoun’s “abrupt expulsion” (Matheson 122) from the group in 1940 for refusing to renounce her esoteric studies (Chadwick 189). Carrington likewise bristled against Breton’s rigid leadership, later describing the “judgemental side of Surrealism” as “extremely distasteful” (Chadwick 12). Breton was arguably ambivalent: although he was enthralled by esoteric and occult themes, he dismissed spiritualist practice outright, remarking that “the hypothesis of ‘spirits’ [was] ridiculous” (Choucha 53).

 

Despite facing marginalisation after being excluded from the group, Colquhoun continued her automatist practice throughout her career and refused to cease her affiliations with esoteric organisations including the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the Society of the Inner Light, the Ordo Templi Orientis, the Druid Order, and Co-Masonry.   Leonora Carrington, a painter and novelist, brought autobiographical and mythological depth to automatist practice.  In her stories and artworks, forms take on metamorphic presences: hybrids of plant, animal, human, and spirit, suggesting fluid identities and visionary transformation. Both women were searching for a subjective embodiment of their own inner world of personally grounded poetics. 

 

Colquhoun was interested in broadening automatism beyond Breton’s psychological approach to automatism, stating “Breton here does not deal with any possible development of the automatic image beyond conveying the possibility of this by an imaginative title” (Colquhoun, 224). She positioned it as a practice of experience: embodied, mystical, and relational, where the act of making ‘spoke’ to the artist, suggesting its content in real time. Her methodology in automatism was not simply about relinquishing control but about entering into deeper engagement with self-analysis, religious belief and spiritual practice. 

 

While early art history often framed Surrealist automatism as a matter of style or technique, its deeper significance lies in the shift it enacts toward phenomenological experience. Contemporary scholarship influenced by Merleau-Ponty and feminist or psychoanalytic theory understands automatism as an embodied practice in which, during the ‘staged event’ of decalcomania, pigment, pressure, atmosphere, and gesture converge with forces beyond conscious control to disclose forms that feel both accidental and inevitable — the unknown becoming known. The value of these techniques therefore lies less in the images they produce, which can be easily imitated, than in the experiential process they enact, offering a vital precedent for contemporary artists resisting the homogenising reproducibility of AI-generated images.

 

Ithell Colquhoun and Decalcomania as Experiential Event

​

Ithell Colquhoun’s integration of art and occult practice was unusually extensive, encompassing automatic painting, poetry, ceremonial magic, alchemical symbolism, esoteric colour theory, Tarot, Gnosticism, Numerology, Druidry, Kabbalah, Tantra and Celtic Mysticism, extending far beyond stylistic experimentation into a deeply integrated personal cosmology. Her archive — now held at Tate, comprises over 5,000 items, including dozens of written works.  She consistently pursued “mantic automatism,” (Norris) and structured hermetic systems within her art practice that evolved in dialogue with her writing.

 

She theorised her practice with decalcomania in The Mantic Stain, naming the resulting forms as oracular signs bearing visionary messages. Colquhoun connected image-making with ceremonial ritual; ‘mantic’ (divinatory) practices such as reading tea leaves. She believed that imagery created by automatic methods was closely tied to the “unconscious mood” of the artist and that visions were unique to each encounter. As she noted, “in many fascinating psychological studies Jung has shown how the alchemist would release the contents of his own subliminal fantasy by intently watching the contents of the alembic” (Colquhoun 221). Because each viewer projects their own associations onto the image, symbols and forms reveal themselves differently, confirming her conviction that automatist images function less as fixed representations and more as visionary experience.

 

Just as the random pattern of tea leaves may be read as portent, the ink blot has long served as a site of projection, most notably in the Rorschach test, where subjective perception is analysed for psychological insight. Colquhoun extended this logic into Surrealist practice, aligning the four alchemical elements with automatic methods: fire with fumage, earth with decalcomania, water with écrémage (marbling transfers) and parsemage (air dispersal of powders across a surface).  She notes that these processes all have an “ancestry in that they are traceably allied to the ‘great work’ of alchemy” (Colquhoun 222), drawing her processes further into the realm of occult knowledge and her serious engagement with esoteric traditions.  

Taking a phenomenological perspective, where the conscious, lived experience is considered, Colquhoun developed the understanding of automatism toward an oracular process, linking material process to natural and spiritual forces, and shifting it from technical experiment to embodied, temporal, and ontological event.

 

Gaston Bachelard’s influential book The Poetics of Space reminds us in his Introduction that perception is not passive reception but active and engaged with the sensory world. In decalcomania, the artist’s body, the viscosity of paint or ink, the environment and weather, the timing and pace of working are all co-actors. The resulting image is not a product of the artist’s intention alone, but a residue of encounter between human, natural and nonhuman forces.  In this sense, decalcomania collapses the distinction between making and experiencing: to produce the work is to undergo an enigmatic event.

​

…through the brilliance of an image, the distant past resounds with echoes, and it is hard to know at what depth these echoes will reverberate and die away. Because of its novelty and its action, the poetic image has an entity and a dynamism of its own; it is referable to a direct ontology… it is in the opposite of causality, that is, in reverberation…the poetic image will have a sonority of being. The poet speaks on the threshold of being. Therefore, in order to determine the being of an image, we shall have to experience its reverberation in the manner of…phenomenology (Bachelard xviii–xx).

​

For Bachelard, the ‘poetic’ image is not a product of cause and effect but of ‘reverberation’, meaning that it carries its own vitality and a resonance that ‘echoes’, awakening memory, imagination and being, often subconsciously, without any logical explanation. To understand an image therefore, is not to analyse its causes but to undergo its reverberation phenomenologically, as lived experience. This experiential turn distinguishes automatism from the reproducible logic of stylistic imitation. While a surface pattern produced through decalcomania could be visually mimicked, what cannot be reproduced is the moment of its emergence: the unrepeatable instant.  The resulting texture is not only visual but temporal and haptic, inscribed with the circumstances of its becoming, often with an immediate ‘message’ for the maker.  The artwork becomes both a finished object and a trace of lived duration. It is this emphasis on encounter that makes automatism a vital framework for contemporary practice. In foregrounding the irreducible event of making, decalcomania situates art not in the mastery of image but in the ‘mantic,’ unpredictable unfolding of experience.  

​

In Meeting the Universe Halfway, Karen Barad outlines the concept of “intra-action,” a term that resists the notion of discrete, pre-existing entities that simply interact. For Barad, “agencies are only distinct in relation to their mutual entanglement; they don’t exist as individual elements” (Barad 33). Through this lens, decalcomania is not merely the artist applying pigment to a surface and awaiting accident, but an intra-active process in which hand, pigment, atmosphere, and temporality co-constitute one another. The image that emerges is inseparable from the event of its becoming, and the artist is transformed by the encounter as much as the work itself. Such a reading positions automatism not as a static technique but as an evolving entanglement — a choreography of forces that challenges simplistic notions of authorship and intention.

 

Seasonal Automatism: Experience as Collaboration

​

If Surrealist automatism offered a way to access the unconscious through material chance, a contemporary extension could move toward ecological and seasonal experience. Colquhoun’s The Mantic Stain of 1939 proposed that the blot or stain could serve as divinatory portals, situating the act of making within ritual, ceremony and occult knowledge.  I suggest that widening the scope of influential energies to specific planetary alignments and astronomical events, can add depth and intention to this experiential and entangled making.

 

My own practice builds on this lineage through seasonal alignment, shown in a work created during the astronomical spectacle known as Lion’s Gate. This annual August configuration occurs when the Sun transits Leo, the star Sirius makes its heliacal rising next to the sun and Orion’s Belt appears prominently at dawn.  This celestial convergence has long been regarded by diverse cultures as symbolically and energetically potent. Its logic is not entirely esoteric; the Sun itself, as a star, provides life through warmth, fertilisation, and photosynthesis, while ancient cosmologies recognised that other stars, when rising or aligning with the Sun, exerted subtle yet powerful influences upon natural earthly cycles.  In the Southern Hemisphere this period coincides with Imbolc (Celtic) and Djilba (Nyungar), the midpoint between Winter Solstice and Spring Equinox, when the first signs of spring emerge and the return of the Sun’s nourishing energy is most vividly affirmed. 

​

Phenomenologically, to work within this alignment is to situate artistic practice in dialogue with celestial movement and seasonal change. In Bachelard’s sense, the experience reverberates with poetic intensity, where the image carries echoes beyond causality into memory and imagination. From a Merleau-Pontian perspective, it is also an embodied perception: the artist’s gestures, breath, and tactile engagement with pigment are inseparable from the unfolding moment.

I produced River Portal by entering the forest during the peak of Lions Gate, working by the river, where the sun and Sirius/Orion (though invisible during the day) were facing my workspace on the forest floor.   

 

After observing my surroundings, I rapidly scattered powdered botanical dyes (parsemage), wax, salts and resins across the canvas in relation to the landscape’s colours, mixing the earthy pigments with river water, then dragging the surface through the forest floor so that moss, leaves, stains and streaks, imprinted themselves.  I allowed the sun to guide the positioning of the canvas over a period of one hour, by moving with its arc of light to eventually arrive on a steep incline by the river, where the canvas began to drain vertically, causing the surface to arrange into a multitude of decalcomanic textures.  

 

Working with natural pigments rather than synthetic paints, I was pleased that these would not harm the landscape. My intention was to work with the environment, barefoot and grounded, recording my ritual on video to capture the lived encounter. At one point, a kangaroo entered the work, licking the pigment and scoring lines across the wet surface–an intervention that exemplified the Surrealist marvellous, unplanned and irreproducible. I responded with my own impulsive sgraffito, scratching back into wet blotches of powder without a predetermined image.

​

​

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

L to R. Figure 2. The Artist in the forest during Lions Portal, Figure 3. Decalcomanic marks and parsemage stains from natural botanical inks, detail from River Portal, 2025. Figure 4. The Artist working in the forest on River Portal.

​

I situate automatism not only as psychological release but as ecological encounter. To make art in this way was to acknowledge that the season, in this case Imbolc, when the ‘return’ of the sun brings a riot of blossoming new growth, can affect both material and mood. The long shadows of late winter mornings, the dampness of river air, and the vegetal chemistry of resins, salts, eucalypt and rosehip all left their imprint, their ‘mantic stain’ in the raw canvas.    Unlike the reproducible surface of a digital image, the resulting work is irreducible to formula: it is a record of when and where, inseparable from the moment of its making. 

 

The kangaroo’s scratches, like Colquhoun’s divinatory stains, remind us that the work of art can exceed the artist’s intention, bearing the mark of forces beyond control. In this way, the act of making becomes an event of collaboration: seasonal, cosmic, and embodied, yet also unpredictable and vital.

Surrealist automatism thus expands here into what I call ecological automatism. It is not simply the unconscious mind that is liberated but the agency of material, time and environment.  This resonates with contemporary eco-critical readings of Surrealism that emphasise the porousness of self and world. As Kristoffer Noheden argues, Surrealism’s critique of anthropocentrism and its fascination with nature already fostered a “proto-ecological awareness” in works by Leonora Carrington, where transformation depends on intersubjective encounters with animals, landscapes, and mythic forces (Noheden 259).  

 

Automatism, in this sense, parallels organic growth itself –Colquhoun’s automatic drawings mirrored natural processes, suggesting that “the writing of nature also proceeds according to automatism” (Noheden 263). Abigail Susik further reminds us that Surrealist automatism was never a closed system but always entwined with autobiography, dream, and the body, destabilising any fixed sense of self while opening to the world (Susik 56). Ecological automatism builds on these insights: it frames artistic making as an intra-active process in which environmental elements and human gesture co-constitute one another to generate imagery.

 

A fellow artist commented that my method was akin to Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings, however there is an important difference.  Pollock was introduced to and had engaged with surrealist automatism but rejected the idea that his work was mere chance, saying: “I deny the accident” (Pollock 144).  For Pollock, control and improvisation created deliberate compositions in what became known as Action Painting.  His drip technique wasn’t purely technical either; it carried elements of chance, but he ultimately reframed it as conscious action, not subconscious dictation.

 

Experience vs. Reproducibility: A Response to AI

​

By aligning artmaking with temporal points such as Imbolc or energetic portals like Lions Gate, the process inscribes the work with an intangible aura.  It becomes a textural residue of experience, asserting its irreproducible singularity, where the stains and scratches are not just marks but momentary fragments of lived encounter where artist, world, and cosmos briefly converge.

​

The question of reproducibility has troubled debates on art since the early twentieth century. Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction argued that the proliferation of photographic and cinematic technologies diminished the ‘aura’ of the artwork and its singular presence in time and space (Benjamin 217–252).  In the twenty-first century, artificial intelligence raises this question with renewed urgency. AI generated images, trained on vast datasets, endlessly mimic style and texture, but may lack the fusion that creates ‘aura’.

​

Surrealist automatism offers a critical counterpoint. Techniques such as decalcomania and frottage are irreducibly tied to the circumstances of their making: the viscosity of pigment, the pressure of the hand, the humidity of the air, the chance of encounter.  As River Portal demonstrates, when these techniques are further aligned with seasonal and cosmic thresholds, the resulting work is inseparable from lived temporality and environment. It is not only the form but the experience that constitutes the artwork.

AI cannot replicate this. AI-generated artworks can be compelling and fast to produce, even containing elements of chance, yet remain detached from the possibilities of phenomenological encounter. They simulate surface but cannot recreate the lived and sensory perception of matter, atmosphere, of gesture and texture.  By contrast, decalcomania and related automatist practices draw their vitality from precisely these conditions.

​

Its outputs may approximate the appearance of frottage or of forest floor impressions, but it cannot embody the ritual act of scattering resins, tannins and river water, nor the unpredictable gesture of animal collaboration, nor can it ‘hold’ the energy of the particular angle of light in early August. This is not to position AI as an adversary to be dismissed, but to underline the distinctiveness of experiential practices. Where AI thrives in speed, replication, and pattern recognition, Surrealist-inspired practices reclaim slowness, unpredictability, and happenstance. In doing so, they offer a form of resistance to homogenisation.

​

To return to Colquhoun’s phrase, the ‘mantic stain’ of experience is precisely what cannot be simulated. It exceeds image alone by collaboration with forces beyond control. In a cultural landscape where images proliferate endlessly, this experiential dimension becomes ever more essential, because it roots art in lived time, reminders of our entanglement with the more-than-human world that no algorithmic image can reproduce.  The Surrealist inheritance of automatism, extended into seasonal and ecological registers, provides a reflective space to give attention to the irreproducible.

 

Figure 5. Animal Interventions, with River Portal, as it dried.  The final artwork will be shown at Early Work Gallery Fremantle in November 2025 as part of the Donnelly River Verandah Artist Residencies 2025.

​

Conclusion: The Mantic Stain of Experience

​

In revisiting Surrealist automatism through the lens of female practitioners, it becomes clear that what is most vital in these techniques is not their visual novelty but their experiential depth. Colquhoun’s mantic stain described the blot as a visionary site where accident became revelation. Varo’s layered atmospheres and Carrington’s metamorphic narratives likewise foregrounded experience as a collaboration between artist, material, and world. Together, these women expanded Breton’s model of automatism beyond psychology into realms of ritual, ecology, and lived encounter.

​

My own seasonal practice continues this lineage. Working in alignment with cosmic and seasonal thresholds, I allow planetary rhythms, atmospheric conditions, and environmental interventions to co-author the work. In such gestures, experience becomes the true medium: light, season, river water, pigment, and chance converge to form artworks that are residues of encounter — irreducibly tied to their moment of becoming.

​

In a cultural landscape increasingly shaped by algorithmic reproducibility, such practices insist on art’s singularity. They remind us that texture is not merely visual but also tactile and temporal, and that aura resides not in image alone but in the convergence of world, body, and season. The stain, the scratch, the shadow: these are not signs to be imitated but temporal markers of encounter that cannot be simulated.

To speak of the mantic stain of experience is to affirm Surrealist automatism as a living practice — embodied, ecological, and entangled — a site where material, temporal, and relational forces coalesce.

 

Barad’s notion of intra-action clarifies why this presence resists replication: automatist processes materialise through entanglement, co-producing artist, image, and environment within the moment of becoming. Against repetition and reproducibility, such works insist on presence, revealing art not as a static product but as an unfolding event — a singular act of becoming in which the world itself participates.

​

X

​

I acknowledge the Nyungar people as the traditional custodians of the land on which I make Art and pay my deepest respect to their enduring culture and elders past and present.

​

 

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon, 1969. Print.

Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke UP, 2007. Print.

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1968. 217–52. Print.

Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Trans. Arthur Mitchell. New York: Dover, 1998. Print.

Breton, André. “Prolégomènes à un troisième manifeste du surréalisme ou non.” Manifestoes of Surrealism, translated by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, University of Michigan Press, 1969, pp. 281–82. Print.

Breton, André. Manifestoes of Surrealism. Trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1969. Print.

Chadwick, Whitney. Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement. Thames and Hudson, 1991.

Colquhoun, Ithell. “The Mantic Stain.” Surrealist Women: An International Anthology. Ed. Penelope Rosemont. Austin: U of Texas P, 1998. 220–24. Print.

Crawford, Kate. Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence. New Haven: Yale UP, 2021. Print.

Mahon, Alyce. The Marquis de Sade and the Avant-Garde. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2020. Print.

Matheson, Neil. “The Surrealist Novel and the Gothic.” A History of the Surrealist Novel. Ed. Anna Watz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. 121–136. Print.

Noheden, Kristoffer. Animals and Ecology in the Surrealist Novel. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. Print.

Norris, Katy. “Between Worlds.” Tate Etc., no. 64, Winter 2024, www.tate.org.uk/tate-etc/issue-64-winter-2024/between-worlds-ithell-colquhoun. Accessed 4 October 2025.

Ross, Clifford, ed. Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics. New York: Abrahams, 1990. Print.

Susik, Abigail. Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021. Print.

Watz, Anna, ed. Surrealist Women’s Writing: A Critical Exploration. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2021. Print.

Zeller, Robert. New Surrealism: The Uncanny in Contemporary Painting. New York: Monacelli Studio, 2023. Print.​​​

​