Ghosts at an exhibition: From image to text in Angela Carter’s strange worlds

Mulvey-Roberts, Marie

Abstract

For the 30th anniversary of the death of Angela Carter in 2022, I wanted to wind the clock back to her 25th and revisit the exhibition Strange Worlds: The Vision of Angela Carter, which I co-curated at the majestic Royal West of England Academy, Bristol (RWA), and remind myself of those artworks which never made it to the show. At first sight, an art exhibition about a writer might seem slightly incongruous, unless of course that writer is Angela Carter, whose writing is so strikingly visual. It is less well-known that she was herself an artist, at home in the medium of both watercolour and charcoal. It is revealing that in an interview, Carter explained that her writing method was ‘always to think first in images, and then grope for the words’. For such an accomplished wordsmith, it is perhaps surprising that the catalyst for her highly wrought and intricate language was the visual and that words, for which she claimed to have fumbled in the dark, were the afterthought. The exhibition provided a unique opportunity to reflect upon that fecund symbiosis between image and word and throw new light on Carter’s legacy. In the Preface to the exhibition catalogue, Carmen Callil, her former editor at Virago Press, brings artist and author together in a moving tribute to her friend as ‘clever as the paint she loved, but taking it all further, leaving behind a lasting canvas, painted in words’.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Apr 10, 2023
• Publication Date: Jul 1, 2023
• Deposit Date: Apr 28, 2024
• Journal: Gramarye: The Chichester Centre for Fairy Tales, Fantasy and Speculative Fiction
• Print ISSN: 2050-2915
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Issue: 23
• Article Number: 5
• Pages: 69-82
• Edition: Ist
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/11928782
• Publisher URL: https://www.sussexfolktalecentre.org/portfolio/gramarye-issue-23/