Last month, Gemma Janes (of Sendb00ks) visited Mexico City with Tali Lennox and Jessica Luostarinen where they visited Georgina Pounds Gallery, read aloud from their chosen texts and reflected on surrealism. Rana Tabatabaie recounts the trip below. Gemma Janes photographed the artists in the gallery and in the neighbouring countryside of Valle de Bravo, where Lennox’s braids dissolve into vines.
In February 2026, to coincide with the opening of Georgina Pounds Gallery in Mexico City’s neighbourhood of Roma Norte, Sendb00ks commissioned Tali Lennox and Jessica Luostarinen to respond to books of their choice. Lennox selected The Debutante and Other Stories by Leonora Carrington, while Luostarinen chose A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin.
Over the month of February, Sendb00ks and the two artists explored the layers beneath this collaboration — from the Taoist undercurrents within Le Guin’s imagined worlds to the enduring influence of Mexican Surrealism. The project unfolds in the 1911 historic building, which cultivated the imagination of Surrealist artists such as Leonora Carrington, Kati Horna, and Sofía Bassi.
Here, in a city built upon Tenochtitlán — the great Mexica capital that existed before the Spanish invasion — nature and the desire for permanence are at odds with one another. The city, like Edward James’s Las Pozas, exists in constant flux with its environment. Roots break through concrete. Vines wrap around overhead wires. It is a dreamlike cohabitation of nature and man. Settled here, the British group led by Edward James embraced the “surrealist place par excellence.”
Surrealism is the product of the subconscious mind, of fears and desires where lies a world of mystery, pain, and fantasy, and the ability to embrace nature and magic and things that fall outside the rational limits of control. Here, James built his Las Pozas after his orchids died of frost, to satisfy a desire to preserve their beauty permanently. A surrealist spatial masterpiece, the gardens remain today engulfed by nature. For female surrealists, this was a space in which to step outside the gendered hierarchies of the European avant-garde, and into an intrinsically feminine landscape: ancient, yet ephemeral, hard to tame, and inspiring centuries of mysticism.
Reading The Debutante in Georgina Pounds gallery felt like a tribute to Carrington, who, having been raised in an aristocratic English family fled these constraints after encountering Max Ernst at a party to join the Surrealists in Mexico, never to return. The short story criticizes the restrictive, performative nature of high-society femininity as it follows a young woman who sends a cannibalistic hyena to her debutante ball in her place. Syncretic in her own right, Carrington created surrealist texts by blending, masking, and nesting, as visualised in Lennox’s painting Peter and the Wolf (where the face is covered by a mask of the face of a hyena.) Through this exchange of skins and roles, Carrington and Lennox suggest that the boundaries between human and animal, self and other, are fluid and performative rather than natural or absolute.
This evolving sensibility places Lennox within a lineage of artists who have explored the liminal spaces of psychological and spiritual interiority, from Odilon Redon’s soft, visionary luminosities to Leonora
Carrington and Remedios Varo’s ritualistic dream-worlds. Mexico has quietly expanded these narratives within her paintings, subconsciously opening her practice toward a deeper sense of the ancestral and elemental. The rainy season, with its heavy rains, rising mist and shifting light, has reinforced an atmospheric counterpart within her emotional landscapes, where tenderness and volatility coexist and where unseen forces breathe beyond the surface.
Jessica Luostarinen, a painter working primarily in oil, first encountered Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea on her stay in Mexico City for the Studio Lazcano residency. Her interest in themes of identity and self, and the way we attach meaning to everyday objects and rituals, drew her to this coming-of-age narrative which delineates the intellectual and social development of a central figure, who embarks on a journey of self discovery through an archipelagic world built on taoist principles of balance and interdependence. Luostarinen’s paintings or “companions”, can be found on copies of her Sendb00ks collaboration, They depict small creatures made of structured foil, the creating of which, was a childhood habit. Luostarinen describes the process of creating this work as “an attempt to unearth something that was left behind, to bring these companions back, and see what they still carry.”
Georgina Pounds Gallery, stays true to the legacy of the female surrealist. The gallery opens with Monsters Paradise: The Becoming of Her Divine Beast, the first solo exhibition in Mexico City by Vanessa Raw.
