Alchemy

Welcome to the Alchemy exploration page. To buy the Alchemy card wallet, click here.

Alchemy is a celebration of the power of chaos. It’s created in honour of instinct liberated and boundaries dissolved. In short - it’s a salute to the creative alchemical power of cutting loose.

The words on Alchemy are by the hugely influential, horrendously misrepresented philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, from his cryptic philosophical novel Thus Spoke Zarathustra. They are an expression of his thinking presented in a much earlier work, The Birth Of Tragedy, on the vital ingredients that are needed to make truly great, transcendent art.

He states that the fusion of Dionysian (disorder, intoxication, emotion, and ecstasy) and Apollonian (harmony, progress, clarity, and logic) artistic impulses (as expressed in Greek Tragedy) allows the art to impart a sense of underlying essence, ‘the Primordial Unity’. This is a state which revives Dionysian nature, bestowing strength, fullness and the power to transform things towards perfection - to create true art.

Lucy Farley’s Figure In The Studio is a beautiful expression of Nietzsche’s thinking. The Figure and the exterior of the studio are almost pure white (harmony, clarity). The Figure is made up of geometric shapes (logic, harmony, progress). The Figure’s hand is consumed in the studio's fertile 'Dionysian' explosion of colour, chaos and energy.

The subject matter of Farley’s painting isn’t the only expression of Nietzsche’s Dionysian/Apollonian concept, it relates also to its specific process of creation and Farley’s own way of delivering ‘Primordial Unity’. 

Farley uses multiple mediums to create her work (often painting, etching, printmaking and collage). This process allows her to ‘progress, evolve and a new abstract language to form’. Distortion - chaos - enters the work as it transfers between mediums. This prompts new approaches as Farley reorganizes memory and perception, maintaining the speed and spontaneity of original in situ drawings.

So, for all us Alchemists working to make precious things, carrying this wallet reminds us that a dollop of chaos shouldn’t be feared or regretted - it’s what we need to make gold.

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The Artwork

Figure In The Studio

Lucy Farley, 2016

Lucy Farley studied painting for her bachelors degree and printing for her masters. Figure In The Studio, like much of her work, fuses the two disciplines, incorporating her love of working with collage as well.

The harmonic, geometric figure enters from white, a blank canvas, into the explosive colour, chaos and energy of the studio. Farley's painting is a fresh blast. It captures the wonderful, reeling excitement of creativity and its potential through chaos and control to cover the canvas that is ourselves.

This work originates from a series of self portraits the artist created in her studio in West London. In this series Farley explores her relationship with her studio - this fundamental space in her life - and her creative process. An earlier image in the series titled Visitor’s Song was selected for the Ruth Borchard Self Portrait Prize. In Figure In The Studio we witness another of the thrilling results of Farley’s exploration into these themes.

Visit Lucy Farley's website

The Artist

Lucy Farley

Born 1982

Lucy Farley lives and works in London. She studied painting at Central St. Martins graduating in 2005, and has an MA in printmaking from the Royal College of Art (2009). Exhibitions in London include the 'Originals' Printmaking show at the Mall Galleries and multiple years in The Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy - where she was invited to complete a two year Fellowship, becoming a Print Fellow in 2010.

Farley creates multi layered abstract images which originate from figurative drawing and evolve through reworking the surface repeatedly. She tends to combine painting (her degree subject) and printing (her masters subject) with added collage in her work. This process helps her to build up a record of time, spirit of place and changing feelings which occur in places of personal connection or inspiration.

Farley works partly in situ to capture speed and spontaneity in her finished works. But she then manipulates elements, transposing across media, layering and sifting fragments. This mirrors the actual workings of memory and how 'the idea' of a place is created. She also seeks to deconstruct and rearrange forms to prompt an awareness of perceived reality. 

Farley started drawing as soon as she could hold a pen. Her father’s architect’s office was next to her bedroom and when he was drawing, she was drawing. Her early childhood also involved spending large amounts of time sailing with her family, traveling from port to port. Seascapes, landscapes and movement shaped her view of the world from an early age - which we see emerging in much of her work today. 

A later, but also crucial influence on(. )is cinema. She is drawn to its transferal between the real and illusory and also its particular ability to impart atmosphere and time lapse. Farley manipulates her images like movie sets and feeds back the visual and conceptual outputs of film into her work. A particular interest in American cinema and a burgeoning obsession with the concept (and practice) of the American Road Trip was displayed in her 2018 Road Trip exhibition at Gallery Kuchling in Berlin. 

Currently, Lucy Farley creates paintings in her studio on Portobello Road in London. She makes work in various print studios, most famously the Curwen Lithography Studio and Coriander Print Studio housed at Warton Hall. Here she works, and is published, alongside renowned British artists Sir Peter Blake, Bruce Maclean and Barbara Rae, amongst others.

Visit Lucy Farley's website

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The Words

Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Friedrich Nietzsche, 1883 - 1885

Alchemy's words come from Friedrich Nietzsche’s often misquoted, misrepresented, but fantastically original and hugely influential philosophical novel.  

It describes how the prophet Zarathustra descends from his solitude in the mountains to tell the world God is dead and that the human as divine - the Superman, is his successor (man's current state being one of transition between apes and this divine being).

It also describes the ‘eternal recurrence’, which says that everything that happens will happen again. For the Superman, characterized by courage and a Dionysian spirit who has no regrets and a passionate love of life, this is a wonderful thing.

The novel like Nietzsche himself is intense, breathtakingly insightful, enigmatic, absurd, ambigious and filled with humour, parody and passion.

It tells us the meaning of life is outside of religion and submission to authority but exists in ‘self-mastery’, self-cultivation’ and ‘self-direction’. As Zarathustra declares:

"I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?". 

But as the words on Alchemy describe and as we've discussed in the intro on this page, chaos, emotion and ecstasy - the Dionysian spirit - are necessary aspects of self cultivation and the creation of the artistically transcendent.

The Writer

Friedrich Nietzsche

1844 - 1900

Friedrich Nietzsche was a German classical scholar and philosopher who is regarded as one of the most influential thinkers of modern times. His writing has been described as a unique case of free revolutionary thought - not tied to any specific revolutionary ideal, but revolutionary in its conception, structure and thrust. It has been claimed that his ideas have served as no less than the foundation of a European cultural rebirth.

Nietzsche’s work takes a sharp blade to traditions, religion and modern society. In its non-prescriptive, idiosyncratic, evocative and provocative nature there lies some explanation for its extensive misinterpretation and exploitation. Nietzsche was vehemently opposed to nationalism, anti-semitism and power politics but his name was posthumously used by fascists to further the things he despised. 

On 3rd of January 1889 Nietzsche suffered a career ending mental breakdown from which he did not recover. It is rumoured that he ran to a horse being flogged in the street and threw his arms around its neck to protect it before collapsing. At this point he was virtually unknown. 

Despite the lack of interest or support for his work, Nietzsche’s belief in its value was unwavering - at points he sought self publication and to translate it into multiple languages, regardless of its popularity. But if he believed in his canon as a gift to mankind, he was also aware of the danger of it being abused. He wrote:

“I am frightened by the thought of what unqualified and unsuitable people may invoke my authority one day. Yet that is the torment of every teacher … he knows that, given the circumstances and accidents, he can become a disaster as well as a blessing to mankind.”

The next 11 years he spent in a state of infantile dependency in the care of his sister. By his death in 1900 aged 55, he’d become the philosophical celebrity of his time. However in this time and for the thirty five years his sister lived after his death, she had bit by bit taken control of his works and their publication. Nietzsche had always had a troubled relationship with his sister, but it is an irony that she became the key architect in the profound abuse of his legacy. She doctored texts and letters, manipulating his literary estate with the aid of her extreme rightwing contemporaries. They fitted together unpublished fragments to implant their own ideas under Nietzsche’s name. She even welcomed Hitler to her ‘Nietzsche’ archive. After his hour and a half visit he departed carrying Nietzsche’s walking stick. The keepsake had been presented to Hitler by Elisabeth.

As a hugely profound and pertinent philosopher of humankind and our modern times, quotable words from Nietzsche feel almost endless. Here are a selection of our favourites.

“Without music, life would be a mistake.” 
― Twilight of the Idols

“It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.” 

"He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you." Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 146

"The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies, but also to hate his friends." Thus Spoke Zarathustra

"Let each day be a loss to us on which we did not dance once! And let each truth be false to us which was not greeted by one laugh!" Thus Spoke Zarathustra

"No one can construct for you the bridge upon which precisely you must cross the stream of life, no one but you yourself alone" Untimely Meditations, Schopenhauer As Educator

“In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.” Beyond Good and Evil 1886

“The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.” The Dawn, Sec. 297

“I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he who is not afraid of my darkness, will find banks full of roses under my cypresses.” 
―  Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“We have art in order not to die of the truth."

“Art is the proper task of life. "

“They muddy the water, to make it seem deep.” 

“A thought, even a possibility, can shatter and transform us.” 

“Become who you are!” 
― Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None

“God is dead." Thus Spoke  Zarathustra

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?” The Gay Science