LEONORA CARRINGTON

I am researching the life of Leonora Carrington at the moment and soaking up her art.  She was an incredible artist and the last living surrealist of her time.  She had rejected her conservative English upbringing and ended up in Mexico where she is still to this day regarded as a superstar of her field.  Not only was she a painter and sculptor but a writer of fiction.  Her surreal novel The Hearing Trumpet is a magical and quite profound story of an elderly woman and how she sees the world around her, or rather, emphasising how others act towards her.  It is wickedly funny and flippant as well as being a meditation on age and the infinity of time.  I can see a one woman show on the horizon and here is a collection of images I've been gathering.

"You may not believe in magic but something very strange is happening at this very moment. Your head has dissolved into thin air and I can see the rhododendrons through your stomach. It's not that you are dead or anything dramatic like that, it is simply that you are fading away and I can't even remember your name." The Hearing Trumpet

I also recently had the opportunity to direct a play reading of M.Rock by Lachlan Philpott, which is also about an older woman who challenges what society has become to expect of her behaviour and who fights for her voice and independence.  It too is quite fantastical and one of the actors even pointed out to me that she thought it had hints of dementia, though this is certainly not how it was to be played.  For here is an example of how reality can mean different things to different people.

However I did see this interesting Ted talk by neurologist/ anthropologist Oliver Sacks who talks about how hallucinating is not uncommon with old age, and does not necessarily mean you are crazy..