About

LEEDS SURREALIST GROUP

The past two decades has seen something of a resurgence of organised surrealist activity in Britain. In March 1994, the Leeds Surrealist Group was formed by Kenneth Cox, Bill Howe and Sarah Metcalf, stimulated by exchanges with surrealist groups and individuals with whom we had come into contact. Ours was perhaps the first significant attempt at establishing a collective surrealist presence in Britain since the group around the magazine Melmoth, which broke up in 1981. The Leeds Group was formed, or rather came into realisation, after an invitation from the Stockholm Surrealist Group to participate in their game, The New Man, which involved the exploration of urban spaces in search of poetic evidence of utopian vision. Games of dérive (chance meanderings through our city streets) and explorations of place have continued to be a dominant feature of the activities of the Leeds Surrealist Group, with the Game of Slight Disturbances (1996), Explorations of Absence (2000-01) and Two Heads (2005) being pivotal to our development, advancing new researches into surrealist objects and their relation to place, and not least to the inter-subjectivity of the players involved. Our researches into place are currently being extended into sound, using field recordings that will be investigated through their synaesthesic possibilities. Many of the group’s early games and experiments were recorded in the ten issues of Black Lamplight (1995-98), an internal quarterly journal distributed solely within the international surrealist movement, as well as in albums dedicated to some of our more-extensive games.

Our first foray into the public sphere came in the autumn of 1994, when we programmed a major season of films, Surrealists Go To The Cinema, at the National Museum of Photography, Film & Television, in the nearby city of Bradford. We participated as a group in the exhibition, Curiouser & Curiouser: les surréalistes et leurs amis en Grand-Bretagne depuis 1967, held in the Hourglass Gallery in Paris during April 1995, under the direction of Peter Wood, an event significant to the development of surrealism in Britain over the past decade. This exhibition drew together a number of individual surrealists, strengthening the ties between us, and leading to further exchanges. Since then, collective games amongst many of the exhibition’s participants have defied geographical distance and an identifiable surrealist presence has evolved. We cannot, of course, speak about the present and future of surrealism in Britain without expressing our indebtedness to those surrealist comrades who sadly are no longer with us and who, through their support and friendship, have had an enormous influence upon us, notably, Anthony Earnshaw, Conroy Maddox, Philip West and Peter Wood.

In 2004 we welcomed the formation of the London Surrealist Group, who announced their presence through their inaugural declaration, Collective Adventure, and who, in January 2005, published the first issue of their magazine, Arcturus.

More recently, in September 2005, we held an important exhibition, Profane Revelation: the Surrealist Movement in Britain, at the Granell Foundation in Santiago de Compostela, with over 80 works by twenty-three surrealists, including that of seven members of the Leeds Group. Profane Revelation, the most high-profile public event that we have organised, was undoubtedly a landmark in the recent trajectory of surrealism in Britain, drawing upon current, rather than ‘historical’ work, all selected from the previous five years of activity. What also characterized our exhibition was that many of the works had resulted from collective visual games, in some cases taking a ‘found’ image which was then interpreted by each of the players.

Internal collective research has always been a strong focus of the Leeds Group’s projects, but we also regard communication and encounters with other surrealists, both in our own country and throughout the world, as of vital importance. From the very beginning, we were warmly welcomed into the international surrealist movement, and have had close collaborations ever since with, in particular, the groups in Paris, Prague, Madrid, Chicago and Stockholm. Our collaborations and individual contributions have appeared in various surrealist journals throughout the world, including: Analogon (Prague), Intervence (Brno), S.U.R.R. (Paris), Salamandra (Madrid), and Stora Saltet (Stockholm).

The Leeds Group’s own external publication, a broadsheet entitled Manticore/Surrealist Communication – containing short articles, reviews, poems, images and examples of games both from the group and fellow collaborators – appeared in 1997 and ended with its eighth and final number in 2006. We now produce a small occasional newsletter, Prehensile Tail, which is distributed freely, the fourth issue having been published in March 2007. In 2007 we also set up our own imprint, Surrealist Editions, with its first title, Down Victory! by Peter Overton, launched at the Hay Festival Fringe on 27th May 2007, at an event, “Surrealism Here & Now”, which incorporated talks, short films, and poetry readings. A second title, The Bridge of Shadows by Stephen Clark and Bill Howe, was launched on 13th October 2007 in The Cross Keys, Leeds. The first issue of our new surrealist magazine, Phosphor, was published in July 2008.

At present, there are currently twelve members of Leeds Surrealist Group. We meet up on a weekly basis for discussions, surrealist games, enquiries, interventions, laughter, etc., and are open to invited guests who are genuinely interested in surrealism as a living movement.

Contact address: 6 Aberdeen Grove, LEEDS, LS12 3QY
Email: surrealism@madasafish.com