Hello Leonora, Soy Anne Walsh, by Department of Art Practice Professor Anne Walsh was published by MIT Press in July, 2019. A series of readings and book chats are planned for Fall 2019 - please join us to learn more about the book and Anne Walsh’s artistic research.

Berkeley Book Chats
Anne Walsh with Julia Bryan-Wilson

12 - 1pm, Wednesday, Jan 29, 2020
Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall, UC Berkeley Campus

Over the past decade, artist Anne Walsh has created an ongoing, multipart response to surrealist painter Leonora Carrington's novel The Hearing Trumpet (written in the early 1960s, published in 1974). Walsh's interdisciplinary works, encompassing video, writing, and performance, chronicle her time with the nonagenarian author and, ultimately, her assumption of the identity of the aging artist. Hello Leonora, Soy Anne Walsh is a visual and written “adaptation” of Carrington's feminist novella, offering a narrative in fragments: a middle-aged artist named Anne Walsh falls in love with the 92-year-old author of a book about a 92-year-old woman who is placed in a sinister and increasingly surreal retirement home.

Walsh courts the author, travels to Mexico to meet her, fantasizes about adapting the book for film, and spends the next decade searching for The Hearing Trumpet's form and cast. Having discovered in Carrington's novel a thrilling, subversive example of old age, Walsh casts herself as an “Apprentice Crone.” She stalks old people and takes selfies with them. She becomes a mother, passes through menopause. She sings her daughter's Disney movie songs at “elder theater” classes. She studies and rehearses the trauma, the affliction, the indignity that is old age, and she writes to Leonora Carrington.

The story is told through facsimiles of hand-written letters, annotated research notes, post-it note flow charts, cast lists, scripts, and a photographic essay that loosely narrates Walsh's visits to Carrington in Mexico City, with additional texts by writer Dodie Bellamy, art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson, and poet and critic Claudia La Rocco.