The Archaeology of Hope was launched on the winter solstice of 2016, with an invitation to a game that culminated on the summer solstice of 2017, which included the participation of three members of Leeds Surrealist Group.
The book is a catalogue of the results of the game, and a record of the exhibition and performance ritual that sprang from it.
Available to buy at cost price as a print-on-demand paperback from Lulu
Also available as a free downloadable pdf
After some lengthy problems with the website set up for our publications, we are happy to announce that it has now been restored:
Leeds Surrealist Group contributed a collage game, creating two ‘masks’ using maps of the centre of our city, for the fifth issue of the journal, Peculiar Mormyrid:
A pdf of the journal can be found here.
Leeds Surrealist Group contributed a collage game, creating six imaginary sea creatures, for the fourth issue of the journal, Peculiar Mormyrid.
A pdf of the journal can be found here.
A collection of photographs with accompanying captions that build into a verbal-visual poem. With 34 full-colour and 2 black-and-white plates printed on Chorus Lux Silk paper, and an introduction by Krzysztof Fijalkowski.
‘Peter Overton’s images of abandoned objects belong in a tradition of the documentation of detritus and material affray running from Atget’s pictures of early twentieth-century rag pickers in the zone on the outskirts of Paris, through the work of Czech photographers such as Emila Medková and Alois Nožička exploring waste grounds and marginal sites.’ – from the introduction, Down Is Up, by Krzysztof Fijalkowski.
In a limited edition of 100 numbered copies only.
42 pages – 17cm x 17cm square format – November 2015 – ISBN 978-1-906238-03-2
Price including postage & packing:
UK £8.00
Europe £10.50
USA & Rest of the World £11.00
Buy online at www.surrealisteditions.co.uk
Members of Leeds Surrealist Group are participating in the exhibition ‘The Little Shop of Magic’, organised by Wedgwood Steventon, in Gallery 116, Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire
LEEDS SURREALIST GROUP will have a Surrealist Editions table at the Artists’ Book Market on Friday 10th & Saturday 11th July at The Baltic, Gateshead.
For further information see The Baltic
We are very sad to have to report the loss of our friend and comrade, Mike Peters, who died of heart failure on the morning of Wednesday, 3rd June. Mike had been a member of the Leeds Surrealist Group since 2005, but a long-time conspirator and fellow traveller before then; indeed, since our group was formed in 1994. Some of us knew him as an editor of and contributor to the influential Here & Now magazine; others as students at the institution in whose side he had been a thorn; and still others simply as a welcome critical presence in the political life of those radical milieus growing up outside Socialist or Anarchist orthodoxies.
A man whose creativity was rarely burdened by convention, Mike could always be relied upon to approach Surrealism as something grounded as much in humour as in poetic and intellectual enquiry. Indeed, despite occasionally doing battle with his own black dogs, he was the most stridently anti-miserablist of us all.
For a couple of years after joining the group, Mike would complain that he was unable to encounter ‘found objects’. One day, for reasons never elaborated, the dam burst and our meetings became coves where vast quantities of flotsam would collect after drifting in on Mike’s tide. Many of these objects would result in fascinating processes of collective enquiry, whilst others would exert a glamour upon him so mysteriously subjective that it would be almost impossible for the rest of us to penetrate. It is pleasing to think of the mixture of pride and child-like wonder that characterised him in this period, and the particular joyous and very honest vulnerability that Mike would bring to the group, challenging the rest of us to meet it. Yet, even in the context of such generosity, we all of us should have liked decades more in which to further appreciate the complex aggregation of compulsions, desires, plans, and peccadilloes of which our friend was composed.
With contributions from members of Leeds Surrealist Group, What Will Be, a 528-page almanac of the international surrealist movement is now available from Lulu here.
Published by Brumes Blondes in the Netherlands and edited by Her De Vries and Laurens Vancrevel, it contains essays, poems, texts & images, from over 170 contributors from 25 countries, in English, French & Spanish, as well as a chronology of the last 50 years of surrealism, 1964-2014.
We are not artists and have no interest in art markets or in the art-world career paths that are often, in their miserable conformism and conservatism, barely distinguishable from those of accountants, solicitors, managers, entrepreneurs, etc., and their self-promotional social networking, their competitiveness, their curricula vitae. Neither do we have any trust in so-called ‘politically engaged art’, nor its twin, ‘anti-art’ (sometimes masquerading as ‘post-art’), which, despite the pseudo-theoretical objections of its hapless practitioners, has no less a symbiotic relationship with the political and economic élite as its more openly capitalist counter-part.
However, individually and collectively, we create things (and situations) that sometimes very closely resemble ‘art works’ to the point that they converge and might even be considered as such. Indeed, taking into account the risk of mistaken identities, and accusations of flagrant self-contradiction, we are nonetheless prepared to make use of art galleries and exhibitions whenever it suits our purposes of communicating surrealist evidence. We remain indifferent as to whether what we produce (more often than not by-products of a surrealist activity or investigation) is considered as ‘art’ or not; this is really of no concern to us – philosophically, aesthetically, morally, or otherwise – and we feel no requirement to provide any justification, explanation or contextualisation.
LEEDS SURREALIST GROUP
Gareth Brown, Kenneth Cox, Jan Drabble, Bill Howe, Josie Malinowski, Sarah Metcalf, Peter Overton, Mike Peters, Martin Trippett
30th April 2013
