Grants and residencies

Research

A Feeling for Nature: Surrealism, from Natural History to Ecology

Application summary

"A Feeling for Nature: Surrealism, from Natural History to Ecology" is a book which explores the artistic and intellectual articulations about nature within the Surrealist movement. Through an analysis of texts and images, periodicals, exhibitions, collective group activities, and objects from the Surrealists’ private collections, the book focuses on the often unusual or provocative and sometimes unsettling or darkly comic perspectives the surrealists opened onto nature. The book will provide a comprehensive analysis of the avant-garde movement’s engagement with historical ideas about nature, from natural history and Romanticism to evolutionary theories and developments in ecological thinking in their era. While specific in its historical focus, the book also boldly sets out to highlight connections and shared intellectual sources between the Surrealist movement and contemporary critical thinking about nature and the problems of human exceptionalism leading into the current knot of environmental and socio-economic crises. The book will be a highly researched academic publication in art studies but also aims to be of interest to wider international audiences interested in post-humanities, ecological aesthetics, environmental humanities, art, and literature.

A Feeling for Nature: Surrealism, from Natural History to Ecology:
At the heart of surrealism from its inception is a critical enquiry into the category of nature and the human place within it. Nature itself is explored in manifold ways, not only in the richness of surrealist visual culture but also through different philosophical, political, economic, and poetic perspectives. The surrealists experienced the natural world as an objectively lyrical domain that constantly transgresses the apparent laws with which humans attempt to circumscribe it. This project has explored how the surrealists produced a significant critical mass of art and writing which explicitly challenged assumed boundaries between culture and nature, and troubled strict distinctions between humans and the natural world at large. The publications arising from my project explore how the surrealists blurred boundaries between the organic and the inorganic, the human-animal, human-plant, and human-mineral, and in doing so, I argue, offer a precursory historical depth to the orientation towards eco-critical thinking in current artistic practice and research in the environmental humanities and post-humanities studies The project will culminate in a publication, ‘Surrealism and Ecology’, to be published in 2026.

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