Leonora Carrington: Navigating a World Down Below

Why It Matters

By bridging graduate training with museum programming, the symposium amplifies Leonora Carrington’s relevance to contemporary eco‑feminist dialogues and equips emerging curators with practical, interdisciplinary expertise.

Key Takeaways

• Students co‑curated a symposium linking Carrington’s work to eco‑feminism.
• Keynote explores Carrington’s 1961 manifesto through surrealist and ecological lenses.
• Intergenerational panel highlights love, trauma, magic as resistance in art.
• Performance by Rose English extends Carrington’s legacy into contemporary practice.
• Museum partnership gives students hands‑on curatorial experience and professional networking.

Summary

The second day of the "Leonora Carrington: Navigating a World Down Below" symposium was organized by four MA curating students from the Courtauld, in partnership with the Freud (Ford) Museum. The event built on the museum’s current exhibition, "The Symptomatic Surreal," and showcased how graduate programs can directly engage with major institutional projects.

The program featured an intergenerational lineup of women scholars covering surrealism, feminist art history, psychoanalysis, and literary studies. Keynote speaker Alice Mon, a Cambridge fellow, dissected Carrington’s 1961 manifesto, linking it to eco‑feminist theory and contemporary climate concerns. A performance by Rose English, commissioned for the symposium, re‑imagined Carrington’s themes through modern choreography.

Speakers quoted Carrington’s own words: “If all women of the world decide to control the population… a miracle indeed,” underscoring the artist’s early eco‑feminist stance. The symposium also highlighted a newly discovered Carrington painting featured in the Guardian, and referenced Françoise d’Eaubonne’s 1974 eco‑feminist definition to contextualize the artist’s legacy.

The event demonstrates a successful model for curatorial education, providing students with real‑world experience, professional networks, and a platform to reinterpret historic art within urgent ecological debates. It also reinforces the museum’s role as a catalyst for scholarly discourse and public engagement.

Original Description

The Courtauld Institute MA Curating programme is delighted to stage this conference in partnership with the Freud Museum, exploring the life and work of Leonora Carrington. The conference begins with an introductory evening at the Freud Museum, including a welcome drink, presentations contextualising their current special exhibition, Leonora Carrington: The Symptomatic Surreal, and an opportunity to view the exhibition out of hours. The second day at the Courtauld Institute brings together an international panel of Carrington scholars to discuss her work from a number of different academic perspectives.

This conference is organised in conjunction with the Freud Museum’s current exhibition, The Symptomatic Surreal, curated by Vanessa Boni. The exhibition is the first dedicated to drawings from Carrington’s Santander sketchbooks, offering a unique vantage point from which to reconsider the artist’s wartime output. In these works, Carrington gives form to her psychological crisis through alchemical symbolism, human–animal hybrids, and depictions of the underworld. At the centre of the exhibition stands Down Below (1940), painted during her hospitalisation and serving as a key anchor for the exhibition. Carrington later described this period of her life as being “down below.”

Leonora Carrington: Navigating a World Down Below is organised by Cecilia Brandon-Cross, Ana Karime Sierra, Han Lu Tao and Sarah Vidalin as part of the Courtauld’s MA Curating programme in collaboration with the Freud Museum, where the exhibition Leonora Carrington: The Symptomatic Surreal is presented from 25 Mar to 28 Jun 2026.