Professor Fae Brauer, writing for the catalogue, Aura, 2021:
From the nineteenth and twentieth century artists who worked with sensory spiritual, occultist and magnetic receptivity such as Houghton, Klint, Hélène Smith (Catherine-Elise Müller) and Madge Gill to such magnetists and mesmerists as Franz Anton Mesmer in the eighteenth century, Charles Dickens and John Elliotson at University College Hospital and the London Mesmeric Infirmary in the nineteenth century, Jules Bois, Albert de Rochas plus Hector and Henri Durville in Paris in the twentieth century to Susan Hiller, Kate Mitchell, Melissa Alley and Degard in the twenty-first century, these explorations provide new understandings of “felt energies” and “superconsciousness”. These “felt energies” can entail the dark and deep energies of trauma. This is demonstrated by the loss of love ones that motivated Georgiana Houghton and so many other Victorian Spiritists and Mesmerists women artist, as has been illuminated by Melissa Alley. This has also played a cathartic part in the creation of her own auratic artwork.
The shock of the loss of her son, Dyllan, to cot death in 2006 felt like, in Melissa Alley’s words, “an atomic bomb”. Retreating to her studio, cathartically she made paintings out of grief, which were free flowing without conscious intervention. As her lost son emerged in her artwork, alongside people and creatures from another plane, Melissa Alley felt that she was communing with Dyllan’s spirit and giving form to the “unseen”. This was a skill that she was then able to hone in order to create auto-trance portraits. Working with these energies was enhanced by her becoming a mesmerist enabling her to use the transformative powers of trance to heal others mentally and physically. “I would flow easily and fluidly between states as I delved into the subconscious and the spiritual, visualizing pictures and colours as I worked with clients’ auras and the seemingly immaterial which for me was very tangible”, she recalls. “All of these practices have enhanced my paintings, whether they be auto-trance portraits of a well-to-do Victorian woman from Scarborough, a 1920’s foundry employee from Deptford or a contemporary mother of two from Hampshire. Once I connected with their energetic traces, I could materialise their lives in paint.” In feeling and absorbing these energies across the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries in a mesmeric trance state filled with auratic visions, Melissa Alley has been able to travel back and forth in time and create a distinctive Janus-faced art practice. From her twenty-first century perspective, she has then been able to explore a dialogue with time, magnetic forces, felt energies and auratic visions.
