Leonora Carrington: Living Legacies

Ailsa Cox · Roger Shannon · James Hewison · Michelle Man

Mar 2020 · Vernon Press

About this ebook

The English born artist and writer Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) has received much critical acclaim and achieved stellar status in Mexico, where she lived and worked for most of her life, having fled Europe via Spain in tormenting circumstances. Leonora Carrington: Living Legacies brings together a collection of chapters that constitute a range of artistic, scholarly and creative responses to the realm of Carrington emphasizing how her work becomes a medium, a milieu, and a provocation for new thinking, being and imagining in the world. The diversity of contributions from scholars, early career researchers, and artists, include unpublished papers, interviews, creative provocations, and writing from practice-led interventions. Collectively they explore, question, and enable new ways of thinking with Carrington’s legacy.

Wishing to expand on recent important scholarly publications by established Carrington researchers which have brought historical and international significance to the artist’s legacy, this volume offers new perspectives on the artist’s relevance in feminist thinking and artistic methodologies.

Conscious of Carrington’s reluctance to engage in critical analysis of her artwork we have approached this scholarly task through a lens of give and return that the artist herself musingly articulates in her 1965 mock-manifesto Jezzamathatics: “I was decubing the root of a Hyperbollick Symposium … when the latent metamorphosis blurted the great unexpected shriek into something between a squeak and a smile. IT GAVE, so to speak, in order to return.” (Aberth, 2010:149). In adopting her playful conjecture, this publication seeks to bring Carrington and her work to further prominence. 

About the author

Professor Ailsa Cox is the only UK academic in the UK to hold a Professorship in Short Fiction. She is a much-published author and leads creative writing workshops on Carrington for postgraduate students.

Professor Roger Shannon, under the aegis of EHU’s Institute for Creative Enterprise (ICE) has generated extensive critical discussion around the screen showings of Josh Appignanesi’s film Female Human Animal (2018) and Teressa Griffith’s Leonora Carrington: the Lost Surrealist (2017). He hosted “In Conversation about Leonora Carrington” (2015) with the then Artistic Director of Tate Liverpool Francesco Manacorda and the journalist, writer and Carrington family member Joanna Moorhead.

Senior Lecturers James Hewison and Michelle Man’s choreographic work “Imaginarium” (2015), partly developed at Carrington’s childhood home in Lancashire, was premiered at the 2015 Tate exhibition and has since toured internationally.

Senior Lecturers James Hewison and Michelle Man’s choreographic work “Imaginarium” (2015), partly developed at Carrington’s childhood home in Lancashire, was premiered at the 2015 Tate exhibition and has since toured internationally.