2023 was a busy ol’ year…

It helps that there's a folk renaissance going on!

[Having spent FOREVER performing all sorts of verbal contortions to avoid using the word ‘folk’—the literal death blow to any funding bids for as long as I can remember—suddenly all the cool kids are doing stuff about folklore, ‘ritual’ and myth.

It happens every decade or so, and I missed out on the last one…]

This has been the first year that I’ve felt somewhat assured in bringing together the two ‘sides’ of my practice—the artist and the researcher. I spent ten years using art to build my archive of underrepresented folk arts and customs belonging to women and other marginalised people, but I had no idea how to centre this in my own making and performance.

I also realise that I felt slightly cowed by the weight of community expectation, both of the academic community, which demands a particular kind of codified genuflection, and the folk music community in which I grew up, the people who know and love this stuff best of all. I didn’t want to ruffle any feathers.

But 2023 was the year of DGAF.

It’s still crucial to me that my work is rooted in good, rigorous scholarship. I believe that art is a form of knowledge making—perhaps the best one there is—and as such, my work should be contributing to the overall pool of human understanding. You can decide if it does that.

At the very least, it has a responsibility not to wilfully add to the pit of human misunderstanding. This is not a surface-level exercise.

However, that doesn’t mean it can’t be seriously FUN. The art that I want to make satisfies the multitudes within me…it’s frivolous and flippant and spiky and comforting. It’s the objects, spaces and performances that I want to have surrounding me—and they literally do, because I don’t have a studio, still.

I also received the nicest compliment a few weeks back from someone who saw my show at serf. They said that my practice was ‘generous’ and I was so touched. That’s exactly how I want it to be. Welcoming. Open. Come inside: this stuff belongs to all of us! Be respectful where it matters—don’t colonise or co-opt and DON’T punch down—but otherwise, get stuck in, folklore only makes sense when it speaks to the conditions of all of our lives.

Huge thanks for joining me on this journey so far…