A Surrealist Stratigraphy of Dorothea Tanning Chasm

In A Surrealist Stratigraphy of Dorothea Tanning’s Chasm, Catriona McAra offers the first critical study of the literary work of the celebrated American surrealist painter and soft sculptor. McAra fills a major gap in the scholarship, repositioning Tanning’s writing at the centre of her entire creative oeuvre and focusing on the little-known manuscript, Abyss, a gothic-flavoured, desert adventure which Tanning (1910-2012) worked on intermittently throughout her creative life, finally publishing it in 2004 as Chasm: A Weekend. McAra undertakes a major reassessment of the visual and literary principles upon which the surrealist movement was initially founded. Combining a ground-breaking methodological approach with reference to cultural theory and feminist aesthetics, and with access to Tanning’s unpublished journals and notes, McAra reveals Tanning as a key player in contemporary art practice as well as in the historical surrealist milieu.

Dr Catriona McAra is Curatorial and Exhibitions Manager at Leeds College of Art. She was awarded her doctorate in History of Art at the University of Glasgow (2012) and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) at the University of Edinburgh (2013-2014).