Skála’s creation of these seaweed golems epitomises the drive in his work to animate the inanimate, and he further exploited the anthropomorphism of the material in an installation at the Rudolfinum Gallery, Prague, by placing the individual heads behind two opposing rows of portholes of magnified glass. The resulting affect was that on close observation of the glass, the objects resembled shrunken or mummified heads as seen behind the vitrines of an anthropological museum. However, at a greater distance, the effects of the glass caused the magnification of the heads to increase, and they thus loomed up to life-size, as if swaying underwater. These ‘Seehead’ objects hold for the artist such intimate traces of a singular experience of the natural environment that he in fact refuses to consider them in terms of art. Instead, they are precious souvenirs of the process of detemporalisation that the artist experienced during his residency on the ancient coastline of California. ‘I do not like to call them sculptures or objects,’ he has written, ‘because this classifies them in terms of particular art categories by which they are then judged. I would like them to be understood as evidence of time spent in another world.’ These heads, therefore, are part of Skála’s personally invested collection of objects that are a kind of hybrid of souvenir, organic and sculptural form.

What I’ve tried to convey here then is how hybridity is a shifting signifier within surrealism and its environs, which denotes both liberation – from the boundaries of strict form and identity – and anxiety, and that the surrealists were sagely aware of how human identity has always concerned itself, whether through fear or fantasy, with hybridity, and how their particular hybrid obsessions draw together ancient and modern concerns about the loss of the human within an uncannily instinctive body. However, I also believe that hybridity is used far more broadly in surrealism as one aspect of the marvellous – that strange old category that blurs boundaries of identity, confounds classification, and makes a virtue of ambiguity.