Emerging from a desolate landscape, a woman ascends to an alter where she conjures strange entities through ritual magic.
Her first incantation calls forth the totemic horse. Now bestowed with wings, the horse takes flight immediately, unwilling to abide by any other’s will, they are freed into the world.
Next, the caster arranges her ingredients on the alter, readying herself for the second summoning. The woman’s voice, transcendent and impassive, goads the hyena into the world. feral and fluctuant, the human-animal hybrid makes a mockery of decorum. Her call: both taunting and tantalising, her wildness: a virtue.
The ritual deepens, the caster now enacts both somatic and verbal components in her spell while a liquid within an egg-shaped cauldron begins to bubble. The vessel transforms, more egg now than pot, spewing shrouded visages, an open red mouth, a protruding tongue, carrion-feasting chicks. The scavengers of death are given life, the shapeless caster is reborn.
Both fantastic and believable, playful and cryptic, A Summoning is a sonic narrative inspired by the iconography and visual storytelling found in the paintings of Leonora Carrington. A Summoning is inhabited by some of Carrington’s most treasured beasts.
Leonora Carrington, Self-Portrait (Inn of the Dawn Horse),1937-1938
Emerging from a desolate landscape, a woman ascends to an alter where she conjures strange entities through ritual magic.
Her first incantation calls forth the totemic horse. Now bestowed with wings, the horse takes flight immediately, unwilling to abide by any other’s will, they are freed into the world.
Next, the caster arranges her ingredients on the alter, readying herself for the second summoning. The woman’s voice, transcendent and impassive, goads the hyena into the world. feral and fluctuant, the human-animal hybrid makes a mockery of decorum. Her call: both taunting and tantalising, her wildness: a virtue.
The ritual deepens, the caster now enacts both somatic and verbal components in her spell while a liquid within an egg-shaped cauldron begins to bubble. The vessel transforms, more egg now than pot, spewing shrouded visages, an open red mouth, a protruding tongue, carrion-feasting chicks. The scavengers of death are given life, the shapeless caster is reborn.
Both fantastic and believable, playful and cryptic, A Summoning is a sonic narrative inspired by the iconography and visual storytelling found in the paintings of Leonora Carrington. A Summoning is inhabited by some of Carrington’s most treasured beasts.
Leonora Carrington, Self-Portrait (Inn of the Dawn Horse),1937-1938