Leonora Carrington spent much of her childhood feeling out of place and not at home. As an adult and as an artist, she created replacement hybrid families by interacting with a wide range of artistic friends made through her travels. These included, among many others, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, Leonor Fini, Lee Miller, and Roland Penrose, works by whom feature in this show. Of these, Fini is particularly well represented, making this show a good opportunity to discover or explore further her work.
Creative spaces and relationships were in some respects as important to Carrington as her artworks and books. A description of activities shared by her and Fini when living in France with Ernst is symptomatic of much that she did at other times, too. The food they served and the costume dressing they used for the staging of paintings also served to disorientate or shock. Carrington later reprised this style of activity when in Mexico with Kati Horna, Remedios Varo and others, all part of her bringing together the disparate through hybridity.
Significant others mentioned among the archive materials included here are Peggy Guggenheim, Horna, Edward James, Varo, and Csizi Weisz. The archive materials provide helpful background to the wide-ranging portrait of Carrington that is painted here; one that Firstsite Director Sally Shaw says “offers a unique opportunity to experience Carrington’s diverse body of work in a new light, taking a holistic view of her life and work rather than viewing her practice chronologically”.
Shaw notes that “this very unusual and insightful exhibition … reconnects her work with the landscapes and influences of her early life in East Anglia”. She attended New Hall School, a convent school in Chelmsford, before being expelled for rebellious behaviour. Her time at this School may, in part, account for the prevalence of Catholic iconography in her work. Other influences from her childhood explored through archive materials include the animals she saw at Blackpool Zoo and the Celtic folk tales she was told by her mother, grandmother, and nanny.
The influence of these experiences and local landscapes is explored in this exhibition through a wide variety of objects, such as skeletons, fossils, Mayan cultural artefacts, and witchcraft objects from East Anglia, reflecting her eclectic interests and subject matter, as also shown in her lithograph studies of mutant animals and sketchbooks documenting her world travels. Studying Bosch in Spain and following English Witchcraft movements with Fini and, later, Horna led to the mystical and magical pictures she produced throughout her extraordinary career, which drew on religious iconography, patriarchal motifs, witchcraft and fairytale themes.
The scenes, characters, and creatures she depicts create a constellation of dream-like and nightmarish images infused with magical realism and symbolism, where personal experience – particularly that of mental distress – is ever-present. ‘The Night of the 8th’ shows the wealth of imagery she can combine in a single picture, with hybrid creatures colliding with vortexes and flowers under a night sky. ‘Memory Tower’ appears to change its nature before our eyes as the mysterious rock structure suggests human and creature forms in its rockface. Images such as these explore themes of female sexuality, the mystery of nature, and alchemy.
A characteristic of curator George Morl is the inclusive and innovative way this exhibition creates, as Shaw notes, an “open and fluid representation of her work helps to highlight the profound connections she made across different cultures and communities”. A wide array of media, including paintings, novels and archive materials, have been brought together to reveal these connections.
Her paintings, drawings, prints and novels are all inhabited by imaginary creatures and animals that refer to Celtic mythology, hermeticism, the Kabbalah and fantastical literature. A series of intaglio prints of beasts depicting a magical world wielding special powers and signs demonstrates her lifelong exploration of hybridity and androgyny through transitional beings and avatars. Here, the Albino raven drinks “all the darkness from heaven”, the “blue healing spirit” of the Ox “Follows your shadow / Into the deepest ravines of the It”, and the labyrinth within the flesh of the Tapir enables “the ones with / Reversible thoughts” to use it “As a prayer wheel”.
As is clear from this exhibition, the many visionary elements of her work, including her feminism, ecological awareness, interest in spirituality outside of organized religion, and understanding of a world without boundaries, not only result in the creation of extraordinary artistic and personal worlds but connect to key themes and challenges in contemporary society. Her cousin and friend, Joanna Moorhead, has said “The themes that were important to her, as long ago as the 1940s, are the themes that are important to all of us today – especially the natural world, our place in it, and the interconnectedness of everyone and everything.” By offering us a holistic view of Carrington’s life and work, this exhibition fully demonstrates the truth of that statement.
‘Leonora Carrington: Avatars & Alliances’, 26 October 2024 – 23 February 2025, Firstsite.
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