![]() ![]() ![]() 1 Her paintings offered a place for these supernatural fantasies to come to life. “I had very strange experiences with all kinds of ghosts and visions and things,” she later recalled. Growing up in Northern England during the 1920s, Carrington was steeped in the Celtic myths told by her nanny and her Irish grandmother. On the right, a white phantom springs from the trunk of a tree on the left, a horned figure in red robes resembling the Celtic god Cernunnos consorts with fellow spirits. Like so many paintings by Carrington, The Kitchen Garden on the Eyot is an ethereal vision. She punctuates her composition with references to the egg-a mystical symbol of fertility-that draw us into this garden as a space of biological and artistic conception. But Carrington, who was pregnant while making this work, uses this garden as a grand metaphor for creation. One might wonder why the artist would direct our attention to a place where little seems to happen. While much of the painting’s action takes place in the foreground, the title instead references this garden in the background. In Leonora Carrington’s The Kitchen Garden on the Eyot (1946), a magical scene unfolds in front of a walled “kitchen garden” where fruits, vegetables, and herbs are grown. ![]()
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