Thursday, May 25, 2023, 5-6.30pm BST (Please check your own time zone).

Join us for the book launch of Dr Catriona McAra’s The Medium of Leonora Carrington: A Feminist Haunting in the Contemporary Arts. Dr Catriona McAra will be in discussion with Anna Watz.

Register through Eventbrite here.

Before her death, the artist and writer Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) had already garnered a cult following, with numerous creative people making the pilgrimage to meet her at her home in Mexico City. Since then, her fame has only increased. Thinking across contemporary art media, The Medium of Leonora Carrington demonstrates how Carrington has posthumously become a medium in her own right, critically haunting the creative intellectuals who met or knew her. It explores the work of a remarkable variety of individuals and organisations, including the artists Lucy Skaer, Samantha Sweeting and Lynn Lu, the actress Tilda Swinton, the novelists Chloe Aridjis and Heidi Sopinka and the ensemble Double Edge Theatre. This long-awaited study provides essential reading for both new and established members of the burgeoning Carrington fan club.

You can find the book here.

All attendees will receive a 30% discount to purchase the book.

Dr Catriona McAra is Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. She is a leading authority on the work of Dorothea Tanning and Leonora Carrington, with particular interests in revisionary historiography and feminist-surrealist legacies in early twenty-first century art and literary practices. Catriona is author of A Surrealist Stratigraphy of Dorothea Tanning’s Chasm (Routledge, 2017), and The Medium of Leonora Carrington (Manchester University Press, 2022). She is interested in how Carrington, Tanning and others have become ‘media’ for the next generations of artists and writers.

Anna Watz is Associate Professor of English at Linköping University, Sweden. She is the author of Angela Carter and Surrealism: ‘A Feminist Libertarian Aesthetic’ (Routledge, 2016) and editor of Surrealist Women’s Writing: A Critical Exploration (Manchester University Press, 2020) and A History of the Surrealist Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2023). She has published extensively on the work of Leonora Carrington and Dorothea Tanning and she is currently completing a monograph titled Surrealism and Feminine Difference, forthcoming from Oxford University Press.