Leonora Carrington was a visionary artist and writer whose work emerged from a deep and often wild engagement with mysticism, mythology, magic, and the sacred feminine. Though often linked with Surrealism, her creative vision went far beyond its boundaries, forging a path that was distinctly her own—spiritual, subversive, and rooted in an alchemical view of both the cosmos and the self. For Carrington, art was not simply expression or aesthetics; it was transformation, a ritual space where the invisible became visible and the soul’s journey could be charted through image, symbol, and story.
Born in England in 1917 into an upper-class but emotionally rigid family, Carrington rebelled early—against social norms, patriarchal expectations, and the conventional forms of religion. Her interest in magic and the occult began in childhood and expanded through her studies of alchemy, Kabbalah, Tarot, Celtic myth, and esoteric traditions from across cultures. After moving through the orbit of Surrealism in Paris and undergoing a period of intense psychological crisis during World War II, she eventually settled in Mexico, where her spiritual vision found both a cultural home and new creative freedom.
Her paintings are filled with otherworldly beings, wise animal familiars, and priestess-like figures engaged in arcane ceremonies or metamorphosis. These are not symbolic scenes in the traditional sense, but inner landscapes—visual spells and allegories where time, space, and self collapse into a single, mythic field. In works like The Lovers, The Pomps of the Subsoil, or And Then We Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur, we encounter the sacred in strange and unfamiliar forms, often filtered through a distinctly feminine, intuitive lens. Her world is lunar, not solar; cyclical, not linear.
Carrington was especially concerned with the idea of transformation—not as an abstract concept, but as lived experience. Her deep interest in alchemy is evident not just in her imagery, but in the way she approached painting itself: as a process of inner change. Like the alchemist working with base metals, her art sought to transmute suffering, fragmentation, and shadow into vision, power, and wholeness. Her characters—frequently female, animal, or hybrid—suggest the shamanic, the magical, and the rebirth of identity beyond patriarchal constraints.
She also viewed humour as an important spiritual tool, and her work—while rich in occult meaning—is never solemn. Her paintings often contain a trickster quality, a kind of wry playfulness that undermines the idea that the spiritual must be serious or inaccessible. For Carrington, the absurd and the mystical were never separate—they danced together in the same imaginative field.
In her writing, especially her novel The Hearing Trumpet, Carrington continued these themes through surreal narrative, crafting a kind of feminist esotericism grounded in the wisdom of older women, witches, and the mad. She resisted systems, fixed meanings, and hierarchies, favouring instead a personal mythology in constant evolution—drawn from dreams, visions, books, rituals, and the strange symbols that surfaced in her own imagination.
Leonora Carrington’s legacy is that of the witch-artist, the spiritual anarchist who reclaimed the sacred through myth, magic, and art. Her work does not ask to be understood; it asks to be entered, like a forest at night, where every step is a threshold. She reminds us that the spiritual is not always transcendent—it is also embodied, tangled, strange, and full of transformation.
