2026
When I was writing The Art of the Occult, I wanted to balance the inherited iconography and established visual language of Western esotericism with work that felt genuinely outside that vocabulary. Alison Blickle was one of those voices.
What struck me immediately was a sumptuous fashion editorial sensibility threading through ritual and ceremony. Women in carefully composed spaces, draped in patterned garments, surrounded by carved faces and vessels, and sculptural forms. Gold, jewel tones, intricate patterns catching light. Textile with actual weight and drape.
Her rendering gives you access to their consciousness. You read them as thinking, feeling beings, not as symbols or poses. These rituals carry the visual richness usually reserved for haute couture or classical painting. The paintings hold actual movement, light, shifting bodies, gestures between the women, something being passed or witnessed. Something shifting.
I’ve been watching her work shift ever since.
In the years that followed, her work deepened into that mythology, but something shifted in the temperature. The rituals became aggressive. The women gathered not just in ceremony, but in violence—explicit, visceral. Time’s Up shows a man with a razor at his throat, women surrounding him, their hands on him, documenting it. Not metaphorical or ambiguous. The violence is right there on the canvas.
Then Medusa. The aggression continues, but the weapon changes. A phone. Women arranged around the figure holding it, their presence itself becoming the instrument. The image becomes what dismantles. There’s a momentum building through these works, ritualistic, violent, mediated, destruction through curation. And somewhere in that accumulation, it felt like something was reaching its limit. A saturation of sorts. Like the conversation had said what it needed to say.
And then the work changed again.
Blickle now imagines a world where nature has gone extinct. Beautiful, metallic-clad figures, uncanny robo-ladies and virtual reality Franken-people step into artificial digital landscapes. They’ve never encountered the natural world, and perhaps they’re even constructed in a way that prevents them from fully accessing or experiencing it, real or not.
Are the glittery tears because they are totally overcome with the everythingness of it, or do they fall because the longing for transcendence is unsatisfied, in the presence of what they’ve been seeking, yet estranged from it? Here is the possibility of a whole different kind of world, a whole different relation to it. But is that even possible for them?
If my thoughts sound scattered here, contradictory, jumping between different observations, it’s because Blickle’s work doesn’t summarize neatly for me. With some artists I can feel the vision immediately and explain it in a few sentences. But hers keeps moving. Each phase offers something different. The rituals, the violence, the estrangement. The same impulse appears throughout: transformation, reaching toward something. But the vision changes so radically that you can’t just say what it “is.”
And maybe that’s kinda the point. The whole thing, the making, the looking, the living with art. Real work moves, it lives. Being alive, it changes. Not exactly the work itself, but the fact that following an artist through real transformation means you’re always catching up. Never quite pinning it down.
To make the same work over and over, the work that was working, that work that people understood…I think perhaps that’s how your vision begins to die. Not dramatically or with great fanfare; it just gets smaller and smaller until there’s nothing alive in it anymore. Blickle doesn’t allow for that to happen. She moves on. Releases what she’s done with after she’s given voice to it, wrung the truth from it, explored it to its limits.
Because the alternative is a slow suffocation, a fossilization, a turning to stone. There’s no staying still. That’s what Blickle’s work insists on. That’s what she’s made me see. Evolve or die. Make some goddamn art about it.
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