After exploring our major surrealist exhibition Forbidden Territories: 100 Years of Surreal Landscapes, pop into our auditorium for an all-day drop-in surrealist film screening!
Leonora Carrington was a British painter and novelist; one of the last surviving participants of the Surrealist movement of the 1930s. Her bewitching works evoke alchemy, sorcery, the occult, and allegory. She said: ‘I am a believer in mysteries. I believe in dreams. I believe in soul.’
Carrington always had a strong connection with the animal world and used this in her paintings and short stories to portray complex feelings and emotions, and even different versions of herself. You can see this in her paintings and sculptures upstairs in the gallery: Ferret Race (stoat race), En el barco (for Edward James), The Pomps of the Subsoil, El Bailarin (The Dancer), and Inventora del Atole.
Building on her artwork in the gallery, this film drop-in will include two film adaptations of Leonora Carrington’s written works: the well-known short story The Debutante (1936), and Inside the Cauldron, based on Carrington’s unpublished essay For Generations.
Curated by The Hepworth Wakefield’s Assistant Curator, Farah Dailami.
Free entry with exhibition tickets.
Programme
The Debutante, 2022 (1936, 8’)
Elizabeth Hobbs, original text by Leonora Carrington
The Debutante is based on a short story written by the Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington, who was presented at the court of King George V and herself became a debutante in 1936. Elizabeth Hobbs celebrates Carrington’s bold and funny story with paint, collage, and a rostrum camera, accompanied by a score by composer Hutch Demouilpied. In The Debutante, a spirited young woman persuades a hyena from London Zoo to take her place at a coming-out ball being held in her honour. Produced by Animate Projects.
Inside the Cauldron, (2023, 18’)
India Ayles and Sophie Mei, original text by Leonora Carrington
An ecological essay, titled For Generations, by the pioneering artist Leonora Carrington has recently been discovered. Carrington’s lost message has resurfaced into a world facing the environmental collapse that she feared. Inspired by her call to action, a group of emerging artists from the UK and Mexico made an experimental film called Inside the Cauldron, produced by The Derek Jarman Lab. Shot inside Carrington’s previously unseen home and studio in Mexico City, the film is a rare insight into her world and work, which celebrates hybridity and the blurring of the boundaries between human and animal.
In the spirit of Carrington’s multi-disciplinary practice, the filmmakers take a similar approach, interweaving footage of the performance artist Isabel Legate moving through Leonora’s house and studio with a voiceover of Carrington’s essay read by her friend, the writer Dame Marina Warner. Inside the Cauldron is an intergenerational plea for humans to see themselves as organisms within the natural world, not separate from it.
