Leonora Carrington and the International Avant-Garde, my co-edited essay collection with Jonathan P. Eburne was recently published with Manchester University Press (2017), featuring contributions by Chloe Aridjis, Susan Aberth, Natalya Lusty, and Anna Watz, among others. Jonathan and I have written a post about the book for MUP. We are also excited to be contributing to the upcoming centenary celebrations of Carrington’s birth in Mexico City! “During this contemporary moment of encroaching conservatism and the perceived narrowing of intercultural relations and international movement, we need Leonora Carrington’s imagination now more than ever.” – Eburne and McAra

 

In A Surrealist Stratigraphy of Dorothea Tanning’s Chasm, Catriona McAra offers the first critical study of the literary work of the celebrated American painter and sculptor Dorothea Tanning (1910–2012). McAra fills a major gap in the scholarship, repositioning Tanning’s writing at the centre of her entire creative oeuvre and focusing on a little-known short story “Abyss,” a gothic-flavoured, desert adventure which Tanning worked on intermittently throughout her creative life, finally publishing it in 2004 as Chasm: A Weekend.

McAra performs a major reassessment of the visual and literary principles upon which the surrealist movement was initially founded. Combining a groundbreaking methodological approach with reference to cultural theory and feminist aesthetics as well as Tanning’s unpublished journals and notes, McAra reveals Tanning as a key player in contemporary art practice as well as in the historical surrealist milieu.

My Leonora Carrington/Lucy Skaer research exhibition (15 July – 2 September 2016) at Leeds College of Art has recently been reviewed by Derek Horton for Corridor8.