I am delighted to announce that I will be part of the OCCULTURE CONFERENCE in Berlin this October! What an amazing line up to be part of! This is so exciting and I am really looking forward to having another opportunity to explore my obsession with Leonora Carrington amongst people who will be just as fascinated about her magic as I am. My topic:
Ritual, Transformation & Hybridity: Leonora Carrington’s Judith
The third volume of Leonora Carrington’s writing published by Fage éditions (2022) includes the play Judith (1961), dedicated to her friend, the actor/director Leonora Cardiff with whom she worked on The Tempest in 1959, also a play full of magical transformations and hybridity. This is the time in her career when, as Susan Aberth notes, ‘a theatrical ambience enters into her painting…as well’ (97) no doubt influenced by her work with Cardiff, as well as the better known productions like Penelope with Alejandro Jodorowsky and Hawthorn’s Rappaccini’s Daughter with Octavio Paz. Unsurprisingly perhaps, these plays also deal with transformation and hybridity. In this play, Carrington mixes the apocryphal Old Testament story of Judith with Egyptian mythology, then adds few surprises of her own. She creates a new feminist mythology from the story that nonetheless retains the ancient heroine ‘wise in thought’ of ‘elfin beauty’ as immortalised in the Old English poem, characteristics that hint that she is more than human. At heart the element of hybridity is the key to a better future and a common obsession for the artist. The Old Testament heroine for all her exceptional abilities nonetheless upholds both the immediate patriarchal system and the patriarchal religion even if she uses her success in the endeavour to carve out a solo, independent space free from many of its restrictions. Carrington both reduces the scope of Judith’s actions and increases its resonances along with adding the element of hybridity, key to this transformation. Ritual ties it all together. My presentation will look at the play as a dramatic ritual which offers transformative power to escape a poisonous patriarchal system. It offers a balm for difficult times and an imaginative force for fuelling change within ourselves and our communities. I will show how the play connects to rituals in Carrington’s other works, too, from The Hearing Trumpet to The Stone Door, and so many many paintings.
I may have to do some creative fundraising to make this happen, but it *will* happen. Join me there if you can (I think I can get you a discount)!