Friend of the Gutter Kate Laity gives a lecture on Leonora Carrington at the 2025 Occulture Conference!

“How can ritual and hybridity become tools for transformation and resistance? In this lecture from Occulture Conference 2025, K. A. Laity explores Leonora Carrington’s play Judith as a dramatic ritual of feminist myth-making.

Recorded at Occulture Conference 2025, this lecture examines Judith (1961), a play by surrealist artist and writer Leonora Carrington, published in the third volume of her writings by Fage éditions (2022). Written during a period when theatrical sensibilities increasingly entered Carrington’s visual art, the play reflects her deep engagement with transformation, hybridity, and ritual. K. A. Laity situates Judith within Carrington’s broader theatrical and artistic practice, including her collaborations with Leonora Cardiff and productions such as Penelope with Alejandro Jodorowsky and Rappaccini’s Daughter with Octavio Paz. In Judith, Carrington reworks the apocryphal Old Testament story through Egyptian mythology and surreal invention, creating a new feminist mythology grounded in ancient, non-human, and hybrid forms of being.”

Watch here.