Selected Press + Publications
REVIEWS
Commission for Create Berwick (2025/6)
“Arts&Heritage are excited to be working with talented artist Lucy Wright on an exciting project in Berwick, inspired by the crowning of Tweed Salmon Queen…This is a Create Berwick project funded by the North East Combined Authority and Northumberland City Council.”
“We’re over the moon that Lucy Wright and Arts&Heritage and will be leading our next annual art commission in Berwick. It’s an opportunity to create a unique experience in the town – something that engages local communities, supports the skills development of artists and creatives in the region, and takes inspiration from Berwick’s unique qualities: including its heritage, people, topography or environment.
“It’s also an opportunity to galvanize our cultural and creative businesses and inspire them to come together and create new cultural experiences in the town that demonstrate why Berwick-upon-Tweed is a cultural and creative powerhouse.”
“Artist, Lucy Wright, said: ‘There’s a long tradition of crowning people at events that commemorate sectors of industry. I want to take that sense of occasion to honour people that serve Berwick and make it the town it is.’”
‘Guisers’ at Haarlem Artspace / Kristian Day Gallery [group show, 2025]
“Lucy Wright works across visual art, performance, and academic research to explore the spaces where folklore, feminism and cultural participation meet. Her projects often emerge from years of study into under-recognised or female-led traditions, resulting in artworks that serve both as invitations and provocations…Wright’s work encourages visitors to reimagine what a tradition might look like if it were made now, by us, for each other.”
‘Future Folk Archetypes’ at Portico Library, Manchester [solo show, 2024]
“The three works in the series draw on and reimagine existing folk customs and characters as gender-flipped and manifestly 21st-century beings.”
Review by Susannah Thompson, Corridor8
“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.”
Castlefield Gallery Spotlight
“‘Folklore is having a moment right now in the arts, but I still feel there’s work to do to address the continued underrepresentation of working-class and other minoritised voices from whom the canon of folklore was largely appropriated—as well as to tackle some difficult questions from the discipline’s history and present.’”
‘Oss Girls’ at Field System, Ashburton [solo show, 2024]
Review by Kirsteen McNish, Caught By The River
“Lucy Wright strikes me as a vital, questioning, vibrant force of nature. Her background is steeped in deep learning and is intricately woven around the understanding of folk customs both old and new, which she uses to flip the coin on well-harrowed expectations. She is interested in both celebrating and subverting traditions, whilst creating new rituals and customs that include those who often cannot connect with others easily. She is radical, questioning and fundamentally wants people, especially women, to reclaim their spaces, bodies and creative practices without the projections and unwanted interventions of others.”
Hedge Morris Dancing [ongoing project]
Article by Kate Spicer, Sunday Times Style [ 2024]
“Lucy Wright…is a mainstay of a scene aiming to remove folk from male, pale and stale hands and return to them to the people”
Mentions in The Lost Folk: From the forgotten past to the emerging future of folk, Lally Macbeth, Faber & Faber [2025]
‘In 2021, the artist Lucy Wright produced a manifesto for better representation in folk, entitled ‘Folk is a Feminist Issue.’ In it, Lucy argues for more inclusivity and progression within the world of folk customs and traditions. All of Lucy’s work aims to bring awareness to lesser-known customs and to empower people to engage in folk practice. A later project entitled ‘Hedge Morris’ was formed as a way of enabling everybody to get involved in morris dancing regardless of location, mobility, gender or race. Lucy introduced the concept through a series of Instagram posts teaching people what morris dancing is, the different forms of it and how they might go about it in their locality. The project has opened up a world in which everybody is welcome to morris dance, no matter who they are, where they are, or how they identify.’ (p61)
‘As Lucy Wright powerfully asserts in her ‘Folk is a Feminist Issue’ manifesto: ‘Reclaim folk for women. Reclaim folk for the poor / benefit class. Reclaim folk for the queer and Other. Reclaim folk for radical politics, community-making and care. Reclaim folk for the environment. Reclaim folk for art.’ (p.63)
Article by Katherine May [author of Wintering, 2024]
I love the work of Lucy Wright, an artist who draws on folklore and activism to suggest new ways of interacting with the year. For those of us who can’t (or won’t) take part in a May Morning event, she suggests a ‘hedge’ - i.e. solo - morris dance. It’s a way of connecting with the tradition in your own space and time.
Article in Tradfolk [September 2023]
“Hedge morris dancing is for those of us who don’t have, or can’t be with a group of morris siblings, on May morning, but who still feel the call to dance up the sun! They can dance anywhere they happen to be: it doesn’t have to be an idyllic rural clearing, it can be the steps to a block of flats, or in their backyard.”
Article in Tradfolk [April 2024]
“the term ‘hedge’ has been used throughout history to refer to things that were unofficial or unaffiliated… like the ‘hedge schools’ of 18th and 19th-century Ireland which educated Catholic children when such teaching was outlawed; ‘hedge missionaries’ who preached the gospel outside of an established church, and clandestine ‘hedge marriages’ between two people whose union was otherwise unapproved.”
Dusking [ongoing project]
Feature by Sophie Parkes-Nield, Songlines [2024]
“…sombre solo dances in dwindling sunlight, accompanied by the autumnal rustle of foil blankets; hooded ravers clasping scythes and berried branches; a montage of globally distributed solo dancers, capering on sands in Mexico and Japan, the verges of the south English coast and inner-city parks…The reason? Dusking.”
“Anyone can go out Dusking. In fact, you don’t even have to go out to take part, if you don’t want to. You can Dusk in your living room, or back garden, or wherever suits. If you’re already a dancer, fab! Grab your bells and give us a jig (or a clog dance, or a tune!). If you’ve never danced before – WELCOME! This is going to be fun!”
Interdisciplinary residency at Hospitalfield, Arbroath [2025]
“Via her ongoing interventions in and with existing folk practices, and playful invitations to participation —especially to those currently sidelined/excluded from the narratives and ‘territories’ of folk (incl. e.g. rural places, public spaces and a sense of shared national heritage)—her work asks, ‘what are the new traditions—of care, of equity and interspecies kinship—we need for living together on our broken planet?’”
Katherine May’s The Clearing. In conversation with Lucy Wright [2024]
“Who is welcome at traditional events, and who is excluded? How do we ensure that ‘folk’ is not just byword for whiteness, or an expression of nationalism? What do we keep of the old traditions, and what do we desperately need to change?
Lucy Wright is an excellent person to ask. A visual artist with an academic background, and Lucy’s work finds new ways to think about how we practice folk in these current times. “I’ve ditched the academic side but kept the art,” she says. ‘There’s still a fairly strong research element to what I do—and I think it’s really crucial to combat the mountain of misinformation out there about the folk arts—but ultimately I feel like art is the best context to do what I want to do.’”
Tradfolk interviews Lucy Wright (2022)
Article by Jon Wilkes
“Anyone who spends time on Folkstagram will recognise her work – she’s the artist behind the Folk Fatales series (see the image above), as well as Bear Dance (see the image below). Her Folk is a Feminist Issue manifesta became a talking point on social media last year… Much of the artist’s work interrogates the problematic relationships between folk, nationalism and colonialism, the under-representation of women, LGBTQ+ and BIPOC communities in the existing canon of English folk arts, and the need for new, more inclusive traditions for our divided society.”
TALKS + LECTURES
Ancestral Avant-gardes [conference, 2025]
Manchester School of Art | Curated by Claire Bishop, CUNY
“The conference addresses the resurgence of interest in ‘ancestralism’ among performance and visual artists, who hark back to traditional, pre-modern or indigenous forms of collective knowledge, often in the form of ceremonies, rituals, and invocations…Speakers include Yinka Esi Graves, Adrian Heathfield, Grace Ndiritu, Claire Tancons and Lucy Wright.”
Folklore Reimagined [conference, 2025]
The British Academy
“Join our experts to discuss the history, evolution, and contemporary relevance of folk dance in the British Isles, exploring its cultural significance and modern re-invention.”
A Feminist Reclamation of Folk [talk, 2025]
The Feminist Lecture Programme
Folk Fatales: Women in morris dancing, past and present! [talk, 2024]
The Last Tuesday Society / Viktor Wind Museum
The English morris dance is having a renaissance—and its women who are leading the charge! Dr Lucy Wright is an artist and researcher based in West Yorkshire. Following a stint as the lead singer with BBC Folk Award-nominated act, Pilgrims’ Way, she turned her attention to researching and making art about folk instead, with a particular focus on under-recognised and lesser-known practices by women and other marginalised people.
Start a new tradition today! [talk, 2024]
Conway Hall
Post-pandemic popular interest in folklore is at an all-time high, with more people than ever choosing to take part in folk arts and customs of all kinds. But the history of the folklore discipline harbours some uncomfortable truths… Lucy Wright is a former BBC Folk Award-nominated artist and a current Fellow in Folklore at University of Hertfordshire. She has exhibited at Cecil Sharp House, Compton Verney and Leeds Art Gallery, and her work, which combines performance, making and socially engaged practice, often draws on her large personal archive of photographs and research gathered over more than a decade of documenting female- and queer-led folk customs.
Folk is a Feminist Issue [talk, forthcoming, 2026]
Vaughan Williams Memorial Library
Artist and researcher, Lucy Wright has long been intrigued by—and kinda angry about—the underrepresentation of women and those of marginalised genders in the British folk arts—especially seasonal customs. Growing up she was told that morris dancing was 'a man's dance' and that women only took part because of the 'women's lib' movement of the 1970s. It was something of a surprise then when, as a PhD student in the early 2010s, she began to uncover photographs of all-female and mixed morris dancing teams, performing in the northwest at the very start of the 20th century, more than 70 years before they were supposed to have first donned their rebellious bells.
ACADEMIC CITATIONS
‘Who should wake coyote? The role of exemplary stories in a time of climate change’, Anthropological Journal of European Cultures, vol. 34, no. 1, 2025
Wright's art sits at the intersection of folklore and activism and is a welcoming one, inclusive in terms of both queerness and ethnicity (Wright n.d.b.). Her practice opens the doors to those who may have been interested in British folkloric traditions, but have, for various reasons, felt less welcomed within the folk community, whether that be amongst Morris dancing sides, in groups of folk musicians, as part of ritual performances, or as contributors to other forms of intangible heritage. There is an implicit ecological sensitivity in her performance of colourful and creative land-related rituals that invite us to consider the potential of vernacular traditions, not only to support a sense of belonging but also as a form of resistance and a motor for social change.
‘Contemporary visions: Refiguring the esoteric; the transformational act of “making” magic,’ Journal of Design History, vol. 37, no. 4, 2025
Artist Lucy Wright is taking folkloric traditions—in her case morris dancing, a traditional English folk dance—and weaving new customs into the expanding tapestry of traditional folklore practice. Using the term “hedge morris dancing” to describe her new type of morris performances that take place outside of an established morris team, while drawing on a wide range of historical and present-day influences, she designs costumes and gentle invitations for others to join her in reimagining historical folk arts and practices. Her aim is to make folk more inclusive, more accessible, and less gate-kept by those who have historically dominated the conversation about the nature of folk and tradition.
Publications by Lucy Wright
The English folk arts has a gender problem. The historical folklore collectors from whom our existing canon of folk performances and customs was derived privileged male-identified practices, often overlooking and/or dismissing those associated with women…This is not to say, however, that non-male people do not—and did not historically—take part in traditions of their own.
In paying greater attention to our living traditions, whether or not they identify as ‘folk’, we are offered a chance to witness at first-hand the evolution of people’s performances outside of the ideological frameworks of the folk movement. For me, this renders ‘folk’ even bigger, more inclusive and perhaps even more powerful than it is sometimes presumed to be. In this moment marked by intense political division and a growing gap between rich and poor, to be able to harness this power feels more important than ever.
Troupe dancing, also known as ‘entertaining’, is a competitive formational dance performed by girls and women in the North of England and Wales…I suggest that appeals to the troupe family reflect the high status placed on familial identities in the working-class communities of which troupe dancing is a part…[and] that the family constitutes a transmission narrative in contradistinction to the use of ‘tradition’ in the cognate English folk dance community.
Girls’ carnival morris dancing holds a curious status in the canon of English folk performance. On the one hand, this highly competitive team-formation dance operates at a fundamental remove from the conventional spaces and narratives of the two English folk revivals with which most morris dancing is associated
Competitive, urban-centred and female-led, girls’ carnival morris dancing functions at a remove from the ‘traditional’ spaces of the English folk movement. However, it has a comparable history in north-western England where it retains great popularity. Perhaps this overlooked practice has the potential to unsettle dominant assumptions about contemporary folk performance in the United Kingdom.
MISCELLANEOUS
Pilgrims’ Way [lead singer, 2009-2016]
Telegraph Best Folk Albums of 2016
“one of the most prolific folk groups in the United Kingdom.”