In a now famous passage from his Arcana Caelestia, printed in London between 1749-56, Emanuel Swedenborg wrote that our ‘ideas of place and distance’ are not anything real but ‘states of thought and affection’. (§1376) Since then, this idea has had a profound influence on philosophers, writers and artists alike, and has had a direct impact on Romanticism, Symbolism, Surrealism and Psychogeography. Curated by the Society’s Museum Director, Stephen McNeilly, this intimate exhibition draws together miscellaneous items from the Swedenborg Collection that explore this theme and confirm our experience of place as an ‘inner sense’, linking the external world of things to our internal world of ideas and feelings.

“a beautiful exhibition: elegant, thoughtful and full of surprises”

Image: Bridget Smith: Use the interior to Imagine the Exterior. Designed by the Fraser Muggeridge Studio.

List of works included

• Manuscript notebooks for Tengai to Jigoku (Heaven and Hell): D T Suzuki, 1909
  
• Illustrations for the Book of Job: William Blake, 1825
• Malacca walking stick: Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) c. 1770s
• Marginalia in Oeconomia Regni Animalis: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, date unknown
• Seat: J J G Wilkinson, date unknown
• Concerning an idea about place: Unknown (7 hand-coloured prints on cotton paper and 4 carbon paper drawings), date unknown
• Four Corners at Swedenborg House: Kessler Voges (Polaroid photographs), 2022
• Copper Printing Block: Unknown (Wood and copper plate), 1846
• Use the Interior to Imagine the Exterior: Bridget Smith (Screen print on paper), 2016
• Aesthetic Movement: Jeremy Deller and Karl Holmqvist (Poster), 1999
• Boxes and itinerary (cardboard and paper), c. 1924
• Plaster cast of the wrong skull: J V Hultkrantz (1862-1938), 1908
• Head of a wrong man: Iain Sinclair (framed text), 2010
• Swedenborg’s Skull: Vernon Watkins (typescript poem), 1957
• Rooms For hire: (street Sign), 1924
• ad caput capitis: unknown (4 prints), date unknown

Click on the image to see the exhibition notes

THE CURATOR Stephen McNeilly is the Society’s executive and Museum Director. He has staged numerous exhibitions and events, the most recent being The Story of Swedenborg in 27 Objects, for which he wrote an exhibition catalogue, and Swedenborg and the English Romantics which included a selection of previously unseen works from the Swedenborg Collection. He is also the series Editor of the Swedenborg Review, The Swedenborg Archive Series, the Collected Works of Emanuel Swedenborg and the Journal of the Swedenborg Society, the latter being described by Annalisa Volpone as a ‘mapping of the impact of Swedenborg’s thought on the western literary imaginaire from romanticism to contemporary times’.

Photos: Kessler Voges