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Detail taken from staircase at Crookhey Hall, photograph: Michelle Man, August 2014

The Imaginarium project came into being from a desire to explore, through a contemporary dance research project , the work of Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) , an English Surrealist artist and author who, despite being a household name in her adoptive home of Mexico, has not until recently begun to acquire the same renown in the U.K.

As dance artists our work draws on the physicality and captured energies we find in Carrington’s sketches and paintings, as well as in her often bizarre and contorted literary figures.

A large part of our work has been developed through an artistic residency at Crookhey Hall, Lancaster, Carrington’s childhood home. This was a unique opportunity that allowed us to come into intimate contact with a place that without doubt left its mark on the artist’s imagination. Traces of this rambling, neo-gothic mansion reoccur along the course of her life’s work.

The title of our work, Imaginarium, pays homage to the richness of Carrington’s artistic vision. It is also points to a place between that which is tangible to the eye, and that, which moves us from both inside and beyond the body.

https://www.edgehill.ac.uk/news/2015/05/gallery-in-conversation-about-leonora-carrington/

Next performances:

16th September 2016, Baluarte. Congress Centre and Auditorium of Navarra, Spain https://nakfestival.com

17th September 2016, La Fabrica de Tornillos, Miranda del Ebro

18th September 2016, College of Architects, Avila, Spain http://www.coaavila.es

To mark Leonora Carrington's centenary year we will be celebrating the Leonora Carrington Centenary Symposium at Edge Hill University:

https://www.edgehill.ac.uk/ice/ice-conference-30th-june-2017/

In 2020 we celebrate the publication and release of Leonora Carrington: Living Legacies with Vernon Press. Please click on the link to see details of our contributors, the chapters and the critical appraisal by Gloria Orenstein, Prof . Emerita , University of Southern California.

https://vernonpress.com/book/810