In Galaxy Ballroom, Scottish/ Dutch artist and writer Janice McNab traces the influence of the imaginary kurbits flower in The Ten Largest (1907), a breakthrough work of early Modernism by Swedish artist Hilma af Klint. These paintings were barely known until recently and as she rummages rural archives for more information, McNab is also thinking about her own past. Moving between now and then, she responds to af Klint with a new set of paintings and an exploration of the way the climate emergency is producing new insights into the art of the past. 

The stitched flowers that she sees repeated in af Klint’s work came out of the Swedish countryside and pre-modern ideas of connection with land. They originally held a code handed down from mother to daughter. Suffragettes provided af Klint with the keys to its painterly transformation, making farmers and militants as essential to the artist’s breakthrough as her more famous Spiritualist collaborators. McNab’s own textile archive amounted to a single silk scarf that had belonged to her mother. The ten paintings of Our Spectral Gardens turn its 1950s design into distorted land-scapes full of cuts and holes. They were made as the artist was losing her mother to dementia. Repeatedly painting the scarf had become their last remaining tie. The loss of mind at the heart of Our Spectral Gardens is not her mother’s however, it is environmental destruction and our shared bewilderment in the face of it.

McNab’s archival work advances the research on a woman artist who was ignored for most of the twentieth century, but this book traces a wider inheritance. It is part of a growing focus on past ecological visions lost in our rush towards progress.