Ferret Race by Leonora Carrington

Let me invite you on an imaginary journey into this painting by Leonora Carrington from 1952. In it, ferret-like animals progress through a maze and emerge at the bottom of the picture as hybrid creatures.

The painting has the alternative title of Stoat Race, and this had me scurrying off to the web to find out the difference between ferrets and stoats. Stoats, I learned, are smaller than ferrets and have white coats of ermine in winter, just like the creatures in the picture. But, as I discovered here, there are also white ferrets, such as the albino or the dark-eyed white, so either title could be appropriate.

In her book Down Below (1944), Carrington describes her terrible experience of being confined to a psychiatric asylum in Santander. She includes an illustration of the asylum and its environs as a sort of pictorial map, which is similar in some ways to the Ferret Race painting, so I have linked her time of imprisonment with the vision of mythic creatures escaping from their oppressors in the painting.

Here, your guide to the picture is one of the magical ferret-like creatures that inspired it. Enjoy!

Ferret Race by Leonora Carrington, 1952

When we showed ourselves to Leonora, she immediately understood us and how our lives were a complicated and uncertain process of striving to become our true, wild selves. She painted this picture to express how we begin as young, tame animals sheltering under the protection of our nursery guides, all in white, as we try to find our way out of the maze.

She understood, too, that the fierce black guardians continually trying to prevent us from growing, progressing and trusting to our own inborn beliefs and talents try to stop us at every point. She has painted them with black rods which isn't strictly right but the feel of it is entirely correct.

She is a very quick student and has painted herself further down as a guard with blue hair which I believe is to say that she is a final, somewhat humorous test: one last, sportive, joke about cowardice that is affectionately meant. Because, when the malevolent black ones attack us, we are too young to understand the whole joke of our lives. The fact is that we can escape the maze whenever we like! It is only our youthful inexperience that leads us to believe we have to stay trapped on all fours within the labyrinth, going round and round the same old paths.

For the ones who make it through, what a welcome! At the end are the elders who have become more than themselves and who have transcended. Here, she shows the elder with wisdom who has become a bird and the one with sensual knowledge who has partly taken the form of a snake. There is also the one who dances their soul into a gorgeous bright mane and tail. The nursery guides are celebrating their freedom with them.

Leonora and I only met briefly but, as you see, she has perfectly illustrated our lives. I did not understand what she told me about her own development, but she said that she too was trapped in a maze and menaced by black-hearted beasts. Happily, she also made it through to the exit and her transformation was just as extreme.

I enjoyed our meeting and will seek her out again for, although we live in different realities, we have much in common.

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Thank you for reading my imaginary encounters with surrealist art. I am taking a summer sabbatical to work on my new novel, so there will be no Fur Cup posts for a while, but I will be back in the autumn with more fictitious journeys into art.

I’ll leave you with a recent picture of myself and my partner, David, enjoying Ferret Race at the excellent Forbidden Territories exhibition at the Hepworth Gallery in Wakefield, UK.