Running from 9-14th April, Potluck was a surrealist exhibition showing in Bath at 44AD artspace. I’ve never really delved into surrealism, but it’s always fascinated me, and when one of the curators, Milly Aburrow, got in touch to see if I’d like to write about Potluck for Teiresian, I jumped at the opportunity.

Milly is one of three curators, alongside her colleagues Lilly Foster-Eardley and Daisy-Drew Smith. You might recognise Daisy-Drew’s name if you bought a copy of Germination, Issue 01 of Teiresian (and copies are still going, so if you’re drawn in by Potluck and would like to see more of Daisy-Drew’s work, consider buying your copy here!). Her artwork, ‘The Bird’, encompasses a spread in Germination, turning the theme on its head by leaning into the connection between nature, growth and death.

Daisy-Drew, Milly and Lilly curated a bold, intense show, approaching their first time as curators with ambition and confidence. They also made a considered effort to include a good deal of fantastic queer artists, two of whom I had the pleasure of interviewing for this piece.

It may come as no surprise to you that a lot of queer people find joy and solace in surrealism. When you already exist outside of society’s rules of acceptability, I can feel the calling of an art form that defies art tradition, and challenges our perception of what art is.

The first interview I’ll share with you is with Louise Hapton, whose sculptures ‘Alfie et Alfonse’ and ‘The witch’s bowl’ featured in Potluck.

Born in 2004, Louise Hapton is a French visual artist and writer living in London. She is currently studying Fine Art at the University of Westminster in London. A self-identified black (Caribbean), queer and neurodivergent artist, she explores her psychotic journey through painting, sculpture, design and writing. Louise published her first novel, ‘Arnold’, at the age of 14, after several years in a psychiatric hospital, where she developed exceptional maturity and self-knowledge. Three years later, the writer returned to the brushes of her childhood to visually express her ills: feminism, sexuality, the anti-racist struggle, the madness-reality frontier and Mariage Frères tea. As a painter and sculptor, her art goes beyond reality, depicting disturbing characters and situations that raise questions about intimacy.

TEIRESIAN – What draws you to surrealism?

LOUISE HAPTON – To be completely honest, I don’t really like positioning myself in terms of artistic genre, I feel like it’s a little old fashioned. While I do enjoy modern surrealism, I would say that what attracts me as an artist into this dreamlike — and nightmare-like — concept is my experience with my chronic illnesses. I suffer from schizoaffective disorder. It’s basically a fun mix of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Some of the symptoms are strong delusions and hallucination which, sometimes, make absolutely no sense. Growing up with these hallucinations and thinking they were real has completely changed my perception of the world. It started when I was nine years old, and when I entered in Junior High School I started creating a ‘Carnet de vision du Monde’ which literally means a ‘Notebook of vision of the world’. In this notebook, I explained through chapters what the world was like to me with drawings, text, and sometimes even coded messages.

T – I love your ability to skilfully conjoin the dark and uncanny with cute, childlike aesthetics. For example, the marshmallows in ‘The witch’s bowl’, and the sweetness of ‘Alfie et Alfonse’. Where do you see the relationship between images of discomfort, even evil, and childhood?

L – I think they are very linked, at least for me. For a young child, the first loss of a family member or of a pet — that very first realisation of death and the fact that we are mortal, is a catalyst. After my grandma died of cancer, I started thinking about ghosts, spirits, entities… It was a real obsession. The manga I was reading during that time was extremely creepy-cute coded, with stories of serial killer magical girls and revengeful abused school girls. Later, as my obsession was reaching its peak, I started seeing Yuka. Yuka was my imaginary friend — at least I thought she was, But soon, I started seeing this very kawaii doll-looking girl covered in blood or with a huge knife. That is when I started associating creepy and cute.

T – Your art spans across mediums, from literature to painting, from performance art to ceramics. Even the clothes you wear are often artworks within themselves, thinking in particular of your ‘Wearable Artwork’ series. What is it about your art, or the message you’re hoping to convey, that pushes you to embrace all of these mediums?

L – I would say it comes from the fact that all my artwork is inspired by this hallucinatory experience. It was all around me. All the time. For almost seven years. Today, I am learning to heal from my trauma and art has been my remedy. If I paint eyes on my clothes, it’s because I literally saw them on me. Sculpting and painting what I was used to see while adapting it into an art piece enables me to let go, and take some space with my memories. The artwork, often, is an object — or if it’s a written text, it becomes a book. Something physical that I can show others and control. 

T – Going back to your two pieces that feature in POTLUCK, ‘The witch’s bowl’ and ‘Alfie et Alfonse’ – what was the inspiration behind these pieces, and how would you describe the relationship between them?

L – These two pieces were some of my very first ceramic sculptures. I’ve only been doing ceramics for less than a year. I started in June 2023. At first, I was very bad at it, but I didn’t give up — even if I failed, the feeling of clay against my skin was enough to make me want to continue. While ‘Alfie and Alfonse’ and ‘The witch’s bowl’ have no conceptual link, they are my two best successes in ceramics from the year I started. ‘Alfie and Alfonse’ was inspired by a story I wrote about Spleen, Baudelaire’s conception of melancholy and ennui. This French poet loved cats, especially black cats. And I thought they would be the perfect familiar — a two headed cat, dissociation, curse. On the other hand (lol) “The witch’s bowl” was an attempt to talk about my eating disorders and hallucinations linked to food being alive, rotten, or poisoned.

The second interview I’ll be sharing with you today is with Ocean Gavin-Mitchell. Ocean’s stop motion animation, featuring a handmade puppet, played at Potluck.

Ocean Gavin-Mitchell is a Fine Art MA student and artist from Warwickshire that specialises in puppetry and sculpture installation. Currently she is interested in queer theories; looking into the idea of the skeletal figure being conceived as a third, non-binary figure through stop motion. The skeletal figure is representative of a non-binary gender, there’s no obvious conforming attributes. This project comes off the back of the artist’s previous work in puppetry, looking at exploring how groups of people in society have been mistreated, using clowns to represent them. The interest in clowns stems from the artist’s personal experience with rejection, much like clowns weren’t taken seriously. Ocean’s work explores the ideas of feeling outcast in society and queer ideology through the medium of puppetry, creating wire puppets from recycled materials.

TEIRESIAN – What draws you to surrealism?

OCEAN GAVIN-MITCHELL – What drew me to surrealism initially was the broadness of the art movement. It seemed like a space where ‘anything goes’, and when I was first creating these little clown puppets originally, it felt like the only art movement I could see my art fitting into. When I  started delving into surreal art, my practice was going through a transitional phase; changing from drag queen paintings to stop motion clown puppetry, and my work didn’t always make sense conceptually, to the point in my BA I felt a little lost. Surreal artists like Claude Cahun, Hans Bellmer, Paul McCarthy and Jan Svankmajer were huge inspirations for my practice, and learning about their own experiences and the spaces they made in the art world for their creations is what helped my work to blossom.

T – I’m fascinated by your continued use of clowns, and by your interest in puppetry. Where did you first discover an interest in puppetry as a means of expression, and what makes you continue to use this medium?

O – My first experience with any sort of puppetry was watching Wallace and Gromit. At the time I didn’t realise it was claymation but it fascinated me all the same, and to this day they’re still two of my favourite characters. I love physical puppetry, like the Muppets and their obscure, whimsical nature, but my main focus is stop-motion.

Stop-motion animation is a very technical form of puppetry, every movement needs to be planned out and well thought over, and that appealed to me. With any sort of puppetry, there’s an element of control to it, as the puppeteer you are in complete control of the character, how it speaks, moves, the storyline; it’s a perfect medium for complete creative freedom because you control absolutely everything. I strongly believe it’s one of the only mediums that can do this. You can plan a painting as much as you want but you can’t always predict the way the paint would fall, how long it would dry or if it would drip somewhere, if this makes sense.  

The repetition of the filming process, editing and sound is all very therapeutic, if somewhat tedious. In my case it gave me an outlet to portray an identity struggle through moving images, and it’s a way to almost regulate my feelings towards that, so that’s why I continue to use this method of puppetry.

T – We can’t ignore the connection to childhood within your art. Clowns and puppets are, more often than not, used to entertain children at fairs or birthday parties. What are your thoughts on the ability of children, queer children in particular, to have these immense, existential thoughts and feelings – such as those that your characters experience? Do you think we underestimate children’s knowledge of themselves?

O – We can’t underestimate a child’s ability to understand themselves and their identity. Children are a lot more open-minded and emotionally intelligent than many people assume, particularly when it comes to queer relationships or identity. Having these strong revelations and feelings at such a young  age could be very challenging; it’s what I portray in my stop motion. Although I am 22, there’s still a huge part of me that feels vulnerable and lost when it comes to figuring out my own identity, as I’m sure is the case with many adults, and I honestly believe if I’d had these revelations and support at a younger age, mentally and emotionally I’d be in a better position today. I’m not suggesting that kids need to completely understand it all, but I think helping them with these feelings through different mediums would help them grow into much more emotionally mature and confident humans who know a changing identity or a queer identity is a positive thing, rather than an overwhelming concept.

Children tend to gravitate to cartoons and performers, so I think the importance of having people like clowns and mediums like puppetry to provide playful but educational perceptions on topics like queer relationships can’t be overlooked. They also provide a fun, comedic outlook on an otherwise bleak world, and kids need that. It’s why I love drag performances so much, as an example, they often deal with serious topics but in such an entertaining and lovely way.

T – You mention that your ‘interest in clowns stems from [your] personal experience with rejection’, and I really appreciate the connection to freak shows and how queerness has been, for so long, presented for audiences to point and laugh at. Beyond this relatability, is there a sense of reclaiming the image of a clown and stepping into this identity that is important to you?

O – Clowns are such interesting beings. My clown was an old persona I made, one I loved very much, based upon my research on freak shows and traditional clowning. At the start of my BA course, this clown very quickly got lost, but I kept unconsciously drawing them, painting them over the next few years. They were born from a feeling of uncertainty, I made them at a low point in my life.

In 2023, I had a rough but really helpful group tutorial in university in which I spoke about my anxieties and struggles, and led to me trashing my current practice. I gravitated back to this clown character, as I was in a position again where I wasn’t sure of anything really, my art practice, my gender identity, and that’s where I adopted this persona  for my puppet. To me, the clown is a persona I can adopt in my practice in place of myself; essentially a mask. The clown acts as a happy, ungendered figure for me, it’s what I wish I could be, which is why reclaiming this clown identity in terms of queer ideas is important to me. Clowns often make a mockery of things, stumbling and making a fool of themselves but they’re also figures of positivity, often misconceived, much like many queer individuals are. There are so many connections, personal and theoretical for me, that I felt I needed to explore this in my art. I’m not sure whether my work does promote the idea of a queer clown identity at the moment, but I’d be happy if it did, as clowns hold such a special place in my own personal experiences. 

I’m immensely grateful to both Louise and Ocean for taking the time to respond to my questions, and for doing so with such insight. I love interviewing artists, and it was a joy getting to know them both.

While I couldn’t attend Potluck myself, a tragic reality of living in the sticks of the South East, I followed its journey avidly and have been intrigued by the collection of art presented in this exhibition. I found the surreal artwork of Potluck unexpectedly relatable — as someone who has learned to hold surreal art at a distance, using words like ‘pretentious’ to demonstrate that I don’t understand what’s in front of me, and that the artist’s thoughts feel inaccessible to me. Potluck, curated by and vibrant with the work of young artists, many of whom also identify as queer, showed me a great number of pieces which I could see parts of myself in.

Pieces like Ocean’s cry out for the queer experience, but there are also pieces such as this one by Leonor Canelas De Castro, ‘Be So Fr Rn’, in their words, ‘reflecting on the experience of growing up chronically online’, which I feel a connection to. I see my own childhood in this work; the isolation and the blurred lines between an online existence and real life. Surreal art is a rich, expansive genre, and submerged in the online world as we are, I can’t think of a better art form to depict the experience of a chronically online upbringing which more and more young people can relate to.

Another piece which had me hooked was this one by Shannon Higgins, and their artist statement brought to my attention another really huge draw of surreal art. In a space which already pushes the boundaries of what we have been told art is and can be, there is, potentially, a more open space to enter as someone who does not look like the artists in our history books. There is a problem with race in the art world as a whole, which does not by any means exclude surrealism, but it seems that surreal art already defies rules, and therefore is a genre which feels more accessible to artists whose identities place them outside of the box of acceptability in art. This may apply to people of colour and queer people alike, and I’m sure artists from other marginalised communities.

I love self portraits, and I love characters. Here are Shannon’s own words on this piece, taken from their artist statement:

Explaining her work Higgins says, ‘In a similar fashion to the ever so self-sufficient Avon lady, think ghetto-fabulous spokesperson trying to sell you their wacky cake mixes trying to make their dent in the world! These are some of the pictures that may be on her LinkedIn for that cheeky cross reference check you find yourself doing’. – The food industry is saturated with people who do not look like me. It is hard to feel like I have a place in that. These pictures attempt to reclaim that ‘boss babe’ energy I desperately need to see.

Back in April, artists and first-time curators Milly Aburrow, Daisy-Drew Smith, and Lilly Foster-Eardley unveiled their contemporary surrealism exhibition, ‘Potluck,’ at 44AD artspace in Bath, alongside a collaboration and online feature with Phantasmal Gallery. Their journey began with an open call for surreal art, aiming to foster community engagement and explore the multifaceted nature of contemporary surrealism. The name ‘Potluck’ emerged organically from the diverse submissions, symbolising the communal aspect of the exhibition, akin to a gathering where everyone brings something unique to share.

United by a passion for surrealism nurtured during their time at university, the trio curated an eclectic selection of works from 48 artists, spanning various mediums. Their curatorial process was a blend of personal preference and subconscious alignment, resulting in a cohesive yet diverse showcase. Drawing inspiration from both traditional surrealism and modern influences, the exhibition illuminated the evolving landscape of surreal art, infused with elements of playfulness and experimentation.

Reflecting on their debut curatorial endeavour, Milly, Daisy, and Lilly emphasise the importance of taking initiative and breaking down barriers in the art world. Their inclusive approach not only expanded the artistic horizons of Bath but also provided a platform for emerging talents, especially within the LGBTQ* community. The exhibition’s impact extended beyond visual stimulation, creating an immersive experience where viewers embarked on a whimsical journey through dreamlike realms.

In retrospect, ‘Potluck’ stands as a testament to the power of collaboration, creativity, and inclusivity in shaping vibrant art communities. As the curators observe the exhibition’s transformative effect on both artists and attendees, they celebrate the playful spirit that infused every aspect of the showcase, leaving a lasting impression on Bath’s cultural landscape.