Research study 01 / British Surrealism
Marion Adnams:
a world awaiting another look.
An exceptional late painting: Colloquy, 1968, the closing years of Marion Adnams’s practice, and the women whose work asks us to look again at British Surrealism.
Joseph Clark Collection · 17 October 2026 · Collection research
Looking closely
Three encounters with Colloquy
Details from the collection photograph. Each crop returns us to a different relationship within the whole painting.
01 / The gathering
A conversation without faces
The two forms at the left rise like figures standing side by side. Their bent tips suggest heads, beaks or handles, yet none settles into a recognisable body. The narrow interval between them matters as much as their outlines: it gives each a separate presence while holding them together. Read alongside the title, these differences of inclination can feel like the beginnings of an exchange.
This is a visual reading of the arrangement, rather than an identification of the objects or a claim about the artist’s intended narrative.
02 / The opened form
The interior made visible
At the centre, a pale golden rim opens around a cluster of grey, seed-like shapes. The surrounding forms withhold their interiors; this one appears to disclose its contents. Its smaller scale interrupts the procession without breaking it. The eye moves between botanical pod, protective casing and imagined anatomy, finding a different association each time.
A published catalogue entry for the related 1967 study identifies Asclepias syriaca. The discussion below considers that evidence; the particular source specimen and any further symbolic meaning remain open.
03 / Surface and silhouette
Between plant and creature
On the right, fine curling marks describe a fibrous or hair-like surface. Pale ridges turn towards the light, while dark edges make the forms appear to lift away from the ground. The hooked upper contours encourage an animal reading; the tapering bodies pull us back towards dried vegetation. Adnams allows these possibilities to coexist. The strangeness resides in the precision of the description.
Enlargement helps us compare painted marks. It cannot establish the material condition, pigment composition or conservation history of the original.
The work in the collection
- Artist
- Marion Adnams
- Title
- Colloquy
- Date
- 1968
- Medium
- Oil on board
- Dimensions
- 76 x 112 cm
- Reference
- JCC-0059
Object information drawn from the public collection database. The institutional exhibitions discussed below concern the artist’s reception; they are not an exhibition history for this painting.
Colloquy / A late achievement
At the threshold of silence
For the Joseph Clark Collection, Colloquy is an exceptional achievement within Adnams’s Surrealist oeuvre. Its significance rests in the concentration of its imagery: five related forms, an almost empty ground, and a compelling movement between plant, creature and imagined participant. At 76 × 112 cm, the painting gives an expansive physical presence to objects whose intricacies might otherwise invite intimate, close-range study.
Its date lends that achievement particular poignancy. Painted in 1968, it belongs to the closing phase of Adnams’s painting career. The National Galleries of Scotland records that she stopped painting around that year because of deteriorating eyesight. Colloquy therefore stands close to the point at which the act of looking, so central to her practice, became increasingly difficult to sustain.7
The broad format allows each form to hold its own space. Outlines remain legible across the room, while fine curling marks reward a much closer encounter. That coexistence of scale and intricacy is central to the painting’s authority. It makes a sustained statement from a small group of motifs, holding the viewer between the immediately visible and the slowly discovered.
Seen in the context of her failing sight, this scale invites a further question: might enlargement have helped Adnams maintain her engagement with these forms? It is a possibility for research, rather than a documented explanation of her choice of format. The sources consulted establish the deterioration of her eyesight, but do not establish when particular working methods became difficult or whether this painting’s dimensions were an adaptation to it.
A smaller preparatory work gives that question a valuable point of comparison. Modern British Art Gallery catalogues Seven Colloquy (Parrots), signed and dated 1967, at 39 × 29 cm, as a study for Colloquy (Les Perruches), April 1968. This records preparatory work immediately before the finished painting’s year; it does not tell us precisely what she could or could not see while completing the larger composition.8
What the finished painting offers is a formidable late statement of her imaginative powers. Its economy gives the forms room to become presences; its detailed surfaces keep them tethered to observation. The end of a painting career does not diminish the ambition evident here. It gives particular weight to a work in which so much depends on the intensity of looking.
01 / An independent imagination
Surrealism from Derby
Marion Adnams (1898–1995) made an imaginative world from things close at hand. Based in Derby for most of her life, she developed her distinctive painting alongside teaching and caring responsibilities. Her route into art ran through an initial career teaching languages, followed by retraining as an art teacher in 1938. Her turn towards Surrealism dates to this period.1
Derby Museums describes a practice rooted in looking: objects encountered on walks, journeys and museum visits were studied in drawings before being transformed through changes of setting and scale. The collection’s Colloquy offers a compelling way into that process. Its forms are closely described but remain resistant to a single name. Recognition is repeatedly offered and withdrawn.1
That distinction matters. A painting can be fantastical without abandoning observation. Here, the visible world appears to supply the textures and structures from which another world is assembled. The pale ground removes most clues to location and scale. We cannot be certain whether these objects are small enough to hold or large enough to stand beside.
What might a colloquy be?
The catalogue entry for the 1967 study identifies the subject as Asclepias syriaca, noting the resemblance of its fruit to small parrots. This gives the painting’s exchange between botanical and animal forms a specific published context. The catalogue’s link to the April 1968 composition is a promising research lead, to be checked against the original study and the painting’s documentation.8
A colloquy is a conversation. Adnams gives us five presences but no mouths, a gathering but no stated occasion. The title encourages us to read relationships: the apparent turn of a tip, the spacing between neighbours, the central opening that breaks the sequence. Conversation becomes something organised through intervals and differences.
The painting invites an anthropomorphic reading without requiring it. These might be participants in an encounter, botanical specimens, or a set of variations on one organic structure. To insist on one explanation too soon would close down the particular experience the work offers: an image that is exact in its making and unsettled in its meaning.
Its restrained colour is equally consequential. Grey, black, cream and a narrow warmth at the openings make small shifts of tone unusually expressive. The strangeness is quiet. There is no spectacular landscape to carry the narrative; attention rests on the objects and on the spaces that keep them apart.
02 / Visibility and recognition
What does it mean to rediscover an artist?
“Undiscovered” describes an encounter for a new audience more readily than it describes Adnams’s entire career. She exhibited from the late 1930s in London and regional galleries, and her work entered public collections. Derby Museums has long been central to preserving and presenting it. The task now is to widen recognition while crediting the people and institutions who sustained that knowledge.2
The retrospective Marion Adnams: A Singular Woman at Derby Museum and Art Gallery in 2017–18, co-curated by Teresa Forde, and Forde’s wider research provide important points of reference. Rediscovery is a cumulative process of exhibitions, archives, scholarship and repeated looking, rather than a single announcement.3
The donation of Adnams’s personal archive to Derby Museums in 2022, followed by its 2023 display, adds a material basis for further study. Photographs, sketchbooks and collected objects make it possible to ask more specific questions about how images developed. They also remind us that the painting on a wall is only one part of a working life.2
2017–18
Marion Adnams: A Singular Woman
The Derby retrospective brought sustained attention to her practice.3
2021
Women’s contributions reconsidered
Whitechapel’s Phantoms of Surrealism examined women as artists and organisers within the British movement.4
2022–23
An archive and a dedicated display
The estate’s archive donation preceded Into ‘the Enchanted Country’ at Derby Museums.2
2024–25
A wider surreal landscape
The Hepworth Wakefield included Adnams in Forbidden Territories: 100 Years of Surreal Landscapes.6
03 / Beyond the familiar names
Women were making the movement
The recovery of women’s work changes more than the list of artists we remember. It changes the questions we ask about how an artistic movement takes shape. Whitechapel Gallery’s Phantoms of Surrealism foregrounded women’s activity as makers and organisers, bringing figures including Sheila Legge, Claude Cahun, Ithell Colquhoun and Diana Brinton Lee into view through archival material.4
Its accompanying Eileen Agar survey presented the breadth of a practice that crossed media and artistic categories. Agar’s career offers a useful comparison in how exhibitions can restore complexity to an artist often encountered through a small number of familiar images. It does not imply that her methods or circumstances were identical to Adnams’s.5
At The Hepworth Wakefield, Forbidden Territories placed Adnams within a broader account of surreal landscape alongside artists including Leonora Carrington and Edith Rimmington. The exhibition also gave Mary Wykeham a substantial presentation. Such juxtapositions make the history more expansive: regional practices, different generations and individual visual languages can be studied together without being flattened into one story.6
For women painters more broadly, the implication is methodological. We need to examine access to training, time, income, exhibitions, collections and archives, alongside the paintings themselves. Those questions should be tested against each artist’s evidence. Gender offers an essential line of enquiry, but cannot on its own account for every difference in visibility or every image an artist makes.
Adnams deserves attention as a painter with a particular command of form, surface and uncertainty. Looking closely at Colloquy makes that case in concrete terms. The point of a broader history is to create room for this specificity, so that “woman Surrealist” begins a conversation rather than concluding it.
04 / An open enquiry
The next questions
This study brings the public collection record into dialogue with published institutional research and close observation of the work’s photograph. It does not claim a newly established provenance, a definitive botanical identification or an exhaustive account of Adnams’s career.
Further work could compare the published 1967 study with the finished painting and with material in the artist’s archive; investigate the timing of her sight loss and any changes in working scale; and establish a documented exhibition and publication history for this particular painting. The gallery’s botanical identification and April 1968 dating provide specific leads to test against those records.
Making a work available for looking and discussion is one contribution a collection can make to that process. Researchers with relevant documentation, catalogue references or knowledge of Adnams’s working materials are warmly invited to get in touch.
Sources and further reading
Historical claims are linked to the sources below. Close readings of Colloquy are the collection’s interpretations of the reproduced image. Sources consulted 17 October 2026.
- 1.Derby Museums. Marion Adnams: Into ‘the Enchanted Country’
- 2.Derby Museums, 23 November 2023. Derby surrealist artist Marion Adnams is inspiration for new display
- 3.University of Derby. Teresa Forde: research, exhibitions and the Marion Adnams Project
- 4.Whitechapel Gallery, 2021. Phantoms of Surrealism
- 5.Whitechapel Gallery, 2021. Eileen Agar: Angel of Anarchy, exhibition announcement
- 6.The Hepworth Wakefield, 2024–25. Forbidden Territories: 100 Years of Surreal Landscapes
- 7.National Galleries of Scotland. Marion Adnams: biography
- 8.Modern British Art Gallery. Seven Colloquy (Parrots), 1967: catalogue record for a study
Collection record: JCC-0059. Image © The Estate of Marion Adnams. Existing collection photography credited courtesy Joseph Clark Collection and Richard Saltoun. Detail views are crops of the same collection image; the painted content has not been altered.