There’s something deliciously apt about the venue for Weird as Folk: Tall Tales from the Northwest. The discreet side-street doorway leading to Manchester’s Portico Library feels like a rabbit-hole, a portal to another dimension. An unassuming, office-block style staircase leads up to the library, chairs positioned at each short turn to allow for a quick sit-down and breath-catch should the climb prove challenging. Small signs inform the visitor of their progress: ‘You’re half way there. Feel free to sit down on the chair’. Another few turns, and the promise reads: ‘You are almost there!’ The seats and signs lend a Lewis Carroll-esque feel to the flight up an otherwise inauspicious, rather cramped institutional entryway, and first-time visitors (like me) may be unprepared for their eventual emergence into a stunning Georgian interior, top-lit by a large domed, painted-glass cupola.
If you didn’t lose your breath in the staircase (there is, for those that need it, a stairlift available at the back entrance to the building), you may well on your first encounter with the library proper. Walls are flanked by floor-to-ceiling bookcases carrying some 25,000 leather-bound volumes – mostly Georgian and Victorian but some dating back to the 1550s.Chairs are dotted around for readers, people come and go, and it feels like you’ve stepped back in time. It’s idiosyncratic, a bit odd, yet manages to be archaic and contemporary all at the same time: staff are friendly, and there’s a café in the centre of the space which, happily, isn’t deathly silent. So, while it feels wildly eccentric in some ways (rules and ropes about who goes where, for example, some areas for members-only), the Portico manages to avoid stuffiness. It’s England, but definitely the North.
Although still a members’ library The Portico is open to all, hosting a public events and exhibitions programme of which Weird as Folk is one. Following paintings by Ryan French, from 4 July onwards, Leeds-based artist Lucy Wright’s sculptural installation Future Folk Archetypes is the latest iteration of this collectively produced, co-curated (with volunteers, critical friends, and other researchers) and evolving series in which newly commissioned contemporary art is presented alongside archival sources and artefacts from the Northwest of England.
Over the last decade, Wright’s practice – which she describes as sitting ‘at the intersection of folklore and activism’ – has centred on exploring lesser-known folkloric customs, often those led by women. She has also initiated new, participatory traditions, such as ‘Dusking’, a morris dance to celebrate sundown and the start of winter on the 31st October, as a way to contribute to an ever-evolving body of contemporary customs and practices. But while Wright’s approach to folklore is radical and politically-driven, attentive to class and gender politics (the possible exclusions of certain constituencies in formal, historicised folk history), it is also playful in its subversion. If The Portico Library is the exhibition’s stage, the large works which make up Wright’s Future Folk Archetypes engage in a surreal object theatre, with four central protagonists, ‘The Garland Queen’, ‘Impette’, and two hobby horses, ‘Pink ‘Oss’ and ‘Blue ‘Oss’(all 2024). When introduced to new characters, we all have our favourites: ‘The Garland Queen’ is mine.
Covered in shiny, padded, fleshy-looking protuberances, her upper body obscured but for the wrists and hands, ‘The Garland Queen’ sits astride a mobility scooter. Both passenger and vehicle appear to have undergone metamorphoses – the scooter itself appears as a glittery, pearlescent chariot or a mechanised, silvery horse, with flowing mane and tail. Not to be confused with the often amalgamated Green Man figure, the character of ‘Jack-in-the Green’ was an integral element of English May Day celebrations, in which chimney sweeps would celebrate the season whilst also trying to raise money to see them through the lean summer months. Wright’s feminist revisioning of Jack-in-the Green reminds us that women’s labour was key to May Day traditions. According to Steve Roud’s 2006 book The English Year, ‘The Milkmaids’ Garland’ pre-dated that of the chimney sweeps and just as the women’s ritual declined in popularity, the mens’ tradition gained prominence. What is sure, though, is that Wright’s ‘Garland Queen’ is far from demure, contrary to popular stereotypes of flushed, virginal milkmaids. In my own free associations on the theme, other archetypes and legends came to mind: Lady Godiva and Queen Boudicca amongst others, but also contemporary queens, fierce, glamorous warrior-grannies zooming along urban streets on their way to the bingo or a show. By invoking traditions rooted in urban environments, Wright reminds us that folklore is not reliant on the rural for its authenticity. Likewise, her bold assertion of older, less mobile or differently-abled bodies into English folk custom attempts to redress the relative lack of positive representations of such figures. But whatever the politics, ‘The Garland Queen’ is also an absolute hoot and, like the rest of Wright’s work, the attention to detail, surface and symbolism in material and form demonstrates that these sculptures are not shonkily-assembled ‘props’ but painstakingly crafted sculptures.
If ‘The Garland Queen’ looks like someone you’d like to have a drink with, in another corner, peering down on the viewer over bookcases which frame the central, open space of the library, are the ‘‘Osses’, reconfigured, contemporised incarnations of the Padstow Hobby Horse. Originally shown at Field System in Devon as part of Wright’s ‘Oss Girls, these incongruous, anthropomorphic frames seem altogether more sinister and mischievous, certainly not benign. In their duel, ‘Blue ‘Oss’ is positioned slightly lower, ‘Pink ‘Oss’ to the side. Both feature a large, circular ‘body’ with a mask-like face which is open-mouthed, teeth-bared, both predatory and up for the chase. On each, a vinyl ‘skirt’ pokes out from beneath the structure. They’re huge, and while Wright describes them as ‘fierce, feminist warriors’, they strike me equally as the nightmarish hosts of a terrifying gender reveal party. If the aim is to scare, they work. Similarly human-sized, and also peering into the central area from the periphery like the ‘‘Osses, ‘Impette’, too, a figure in ceramic and felt, is described as ‘cheerfully grotesque’. Based on the Lincoln Imp, a medieval carving in the Angel Chapel of Lincoln Cathedral, Wright has transported and reimagined the Imp as the third act in her tableau. The transgressive ‘Impette’, with her horns, jester’s legs, huge ears, and heavy, ‘Scouse Brows’ (the latter the artists’ description, not mine) is her final ‘future folk archetype’, again referencing class and gender in the formation of new customs, celebrations and place-based traditions.
The expanded exhibition between and around Wright’s work includes vitrines containing witches’ bottles, hidden shoes and other folkloric artefacts from the North West. Garlands, documentary footage of morris dancing, a pop-up exhibition display on crows and corvids by Two Crows Studio, and books on the occult and mythology from the Portico’s collection are also on show. It’s a heady mix, but perhaps entirely appropriate for the former reading room of Thomas De Quincey, famous for his 1821 Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Other former library members include the feminist activist Emmeline Pankhurst and the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, whose work on women, class and labour struggles are pertinent to the themes of the exhibition. Wright, then, is in good company. A fascination with alchemy, mythology and folklore isn’t a new focus in contemporary art and culture, of course. If anything, references to folk history have grown exponentially in the last two decades or so. Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan’s 2004 mumming play ‘The Slapstick Mystics with Sticks’, Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane’s2005 ‘Folk Archive’project, or Lucy Stein’s ongoing painterly references to (and invocations of) British and Celtic folklore, particularly its witchy, goddessy female side, are cases in point. In the formation of a new English folk canon, or a contemporary counter-canon, Wright’s work is nevertheless entirely distinctive in its forms, exquisitely made, and entirely apposite in this setting. With such an extensive corpus of English folklore to explore, I’m intrigued to see what she’ll do next.
Future Folk Archetypes was at the Portico Library, Manchester, 3 September – 2 November 2024.
Susannah Thompson is a writer and art historian. She is Professor of Fine Art at Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University.
This review is supported by The Portico Library, funded by National Lottery Heritage Fund as part of Dynamic Collections.
Published 05.11.2024 by Jazmine Linklater in Reviews
1,434 words