{"title":"Books by Joanna Moorhead","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9780500025512","title":"Surreal Spaces","description":"An illustrated biography of the remarkable and pioneering artist Leonora Carrington, told through the houses and locations that had meaning for her and are fundamental to an understanding of her work.     An evocative visual chronicle on the life of Leonora Carrington as seen through interiors, international locations and vintage photographs, this book leads the reader on a personal journey through the many spaces she inhabited and which infused and haunted her art and the people she knew.     Long underrated, Carrington is now considered as one of the vanguard, not only in histories of women artists but also Surrealism; her interests – feminism, ecology and life-enhancing art – are now shared by many. Challenging the conventions of her time, Carrington abandoned family, society and England to embrace new experiences and mix with artists in Europe and America, and to forge her own unique artistic style.     From Lancashire to London, Cornwall to France and Spain, then to Mexico, New York and finally back to Mexico, each place and interior became etched in her memory – whether her grandmother’s kitchen with its giant stove, Parisian cafés, a rural French hideaway, the sanatorium in Santander or her Mexican sanctuary – only to be echoed, sometimes decades later, in her paintings and writings. ‘Houses are really bodies,’ she wrote in her novella The Hearing Trumpet (1974), ‘We connect ourselves with walls, roofs, and objects just as we hang on to our livers, skeletons, flesh and blood streams.’","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43128907956402,"sku":"9780500025512","price":30.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780500025512.jpg?v=1786013522"},{"product_id":"9780349008790","title":"The Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn 2006 journalist Joanna Moorhead discovered that her father's cousin, Prim, who had disappeared many decades earlier, was now a famous artist in Mexico.  Although rarely spoken of in her own family (regarded as a black sheep, a wild child; someone they were better off without) in the meantime Leonora Carrington had become a national treasure in Mexico, where she now lived, while her paintings are fetching ever-higher prices at auction today.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIntrigued by her story, Joanna set off to Mexico City to find her lost relation.  Later she was to return to Mexico ten times more between then and Leonora's death in 2011, sometimes staying for months at a time and subsequently travelling around Britain and through Europe in search of the loose ends of her tale.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThey spent days talking and reading together, drinking tea and tequila, going for walks and to parties and eating take away pizzas or dining out in her local restaurants as Leonora told Joanna the wild and amazing truth about a life that had taken her from the suffocating existence of a debutante in London via war-torn France with her lover, Max Ernst, to incarceration in an asylum and finally to the life of a recluse in Mexico City.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLeonora was one of the last surviving participants in the Surrealist movement of the 1930s, a founding member of the Women's Liberation Movement in Mexico during the 1970s and a woman whose reputation will survive not only as a muse but as a novelist and a great artist. This book is the extraordinary story of Leonora Carrington's life, and of the friendship between two women, related by blood but previously unknown to one another, whose encounters were to change both their lives.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43206047826098,"sku":"9780349008790","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780349008790_252c16c5-6372-4181-aa3e-d1f529a86e57.jpg?v=1786014082"},{"product_id":"the-lost-artist-of-florence","title":"The Lost Artist of Florence","description":"The untold biography of Plautilla Nelli, Florence's first-known female Renaissance artist.     A captivating journey into the life and legacy of Plautilla Nelli (1524–1588), The Lost Artist of Florence shines new light on the tale of this trailblazing nun-artist. Writer and journalist Joanna Moorhead takes us to Florence, the Renaissance’s cradle city, where Nelli was confined to a monastery by her parents aged just fourteen. Despite regulations against women joining guilds or formally studying anatomy Nelli's talent flourished, and she went on to become the city’s first-known woman artist.     A pioneering figure, Nelli was praised by the likes of Giorgio Vasari but faded into obscurity until the restoration of two of her paintings in 2019, rediscovered after almost five centuries of neglect. Drawing on years of meticulous research and personal connections to convent life, Moorhead recounts the detective-like quest to track down Nelli’s forgotten works and revive her artistic legacy. Painting a vivid picture of her own, she delves into the counter-cultural existence of convent life and explores how Nelli defied the constraints of her time to create ambitious, monumental masterpieces that rivalled those of her male contemporaries. From her early years in a Dominican convent to her groundbreaking achievements as a self-taught artist, Nelli’s journey is one of immense innovation, community, loss and rediscovery.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57499417379189,"sku":"9780500026847","price":28.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}]}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-joanna-moorhead.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}