Hopefully
Three watercolour paintings
The Burning That Begins in the Eyes
Everywhere we look there are faces staring back at us. Out of the corner of the eye, we spy a wink from a passing shadow or a smile in a gleam of water. We project our selves outward into the field we experience. These four collages record what I have discovered in flowers, hair, and other objects.
All the Octopi
These visual poems, which sit on a line between facts and aesthetics, celebrate octopuses. The text, consisting of a list of the common names of all octopi, is repeated and fractured and then images and colours are layered on. The process is more intuitive than deliberate, with accidents and random configurations contributing to the creative process.
Breathing Hard and Voluptuously Sleazy
These mixed-media visual poems combine acrylic paint, cut-up text and digital processes.
Femininity, Animism, and Politics: how Pop Surrealists are Re-inventing Surrealism
From female avatars to mountains with eyes, Dorothy Circus Gallery's Alexandra Mazzanti talks about trends both old and new in pop surrealism
John Maradik Surreal-Absurd Sampler
Three poems and two collages from John Maradik, complete with an intro on the surreal.
Rachel B. Glaser Surreal-Absurd Sampler
Six unique and absurd pieces from poet, short story writer, and novelist Rachel B. Glaser, complete with a mini-essay on the surreal.
Laura Wetherington Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“Thylias Moss once said to me that the knots and turns in a tree’s branches are all evidence of failures, but in the context of a complex system, they make the tree beautiful and unique. I turned to the trees, first with tree rubbings, and then with collage. I am making new sonnets, visual ones then, in the spirit of Antonin Artaud’s desire to get outside of language.”
Barton Smock Surreal-Absurd Sampler
Highlighting eight surreal/absurd poems from the ever-prolific and often self-published writer Barton Smock, complete with a mini-essay on surrealism and absurdism.
Points West
Five handmade collages
Bill Herbert Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“The non-sequiturs of the word paintings in particular set us puzzles we can neither avoid, solve, nor entirely ignore. […] This is surreal in the way John Ashbery is - something appears to be consistent at the same time as engaging with it seems to establish that it is not.”
Julia Rose Lewis Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“I suspect my poems appear surreal, because there is significant overlap between the ways in which scientists and surrealists look at the world. Commonsense is backgrounded, in both, curiosity is foregrounded.“
Forgetting Tomorrow
Five digital paintings.
Outraged by Pleasure
A selection of images from the collage artist Kathy Bruce
Ian McMillan Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“I can more or less remember when I first tried to be surrealistically creative: it was on a church youth club trip to London in around 1969 when I was 13. On the way home my mates and I were spectacularly bored on the rattling bus and I said, apropos of nothing, that when I got home I was going wash my hands in a bowl made from old leather cucumbers when I got home. That collision of leather and cucumbers got a laugh and a surreal door was opened in my mind.”
Sophie Herxheimer Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“Surrealism is just a way to cope with the extreme ordinariness and horror of daily life. If we don’t play, it’s like an acceptance of a world in which we eat and dress from a giant monotonous supermarket – we are at the mercy of the chains!”
The Book of Silence
Five object poems.
Dan Power Surreal-Absurd Sampler
“every night i lie in bed and lie and wait until my mind logs off … until my hardware powers down … i don’t know where i go at night or where i go during the day … i think this lack of knowledge is evident in my writing …”
Joe Sorren’s Between the Wrinkles
In the early 2000s, Joe Sorren emerged as an important figure in the eclectic and transversal artistic movement of Pop Surrealism, also known as Lowbrow art. These narrative paintings traverse the rooms of memory, unveiling in each work a hint of a story the artist holds closely within himself.
Out walking the fly, met girl with a flower
A selection of images from the Scottish Surrealist and collage artist John Dummet
The never-ending quest…
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