London Fortean Society: Art / Magic / Lore

29 Jun 2024 11am-6pm

Overview

Art, magic and folklore cross over and over again making new forms of creativity and lore. Join us at Conway Hall for talks and discussion on making new traditions, lost woman artists, radical Morris Dance and much more.

Lucy Wright: Start A New Tradition Today!
Lucy Wright’s multidisciplinary practice sits at the intersection of folklore and activism, often using as source material the large personal archive of photographs and research she has gathered over nearly a decade of documenting female and queer-led folk customs. Many of her projects reference and subvert traditional arts—both material and performed—to explore the contestations of gender and class in the archive, and recurrent themes in her works include female solitude, the relationships between the body and the landscape, and self-determined arts and community-making, outside of mainstream institutions and frameworks.

Kathryn Atherton : Mary Neal and the Suffragettes Who Saved Morris Dancing
The Morris revival and the militant suffrage movement were inextricably linked. The leader of the dance revival, Mary Neal, was a life-long radical campaigner for the rights of women and children. She and Emmeline both sat on the national committee of Mrs Pankhurst’s militant Women’s Social and Political Union, the most notorious of the groups campaigning for the vote for women.

After an MPhil in 17th Century Studies, Kathryn Atherton wrote for the Oxford English Dictionary, she then spent 10 years as a city lawyer. She is currently responsible for exhibitions at Dorking Museum and regularly leads guided walks and speaks on local history in the Dorking area.

Jennifer Higgie: A Journey into Women, Art and the Spirit World
Jennifer Higgie explores the notion that it’s not so long ago that a woman’s expressed interest in other realms would have ruined her reputation, or even killed her – and yet spiritualism, in various incarnations, has influenced numerous men without repercussion.
 
The fact that so many radical women artists of their generation also drank deeply from the same spiritual well has for too long been sorely neglected. While the individual work of these artists is unique, the women loosely shared the same goal: to communicate with, and learn from, other dimensions. Weaving in and out of these myriad lives, sharing her own memories of otherworldly experiences, Jennifer Higgie discusses the solace of ritual, the gender exclusions of art history, the contemporary relevance of myth, the boom in alternative ways of understanding the world and the impact of spiritualism on feminism and contemporary art.

Amy Hale: Ithell Colquhoun: Landscape and Love
After decades of neglect, the British Surrealist and occultist Ithell Colquhoun’s unique vision and hermetic life have generated enormous interest amongst historians and practitioners of art and magic. Amy Hale examines the magical and cultural confluences that shaped her imaginative life and artistic vision.

 
Dr. Amy Hale is an Atlanta-based writer, curator, and critic, ethnographer and folklorist, speaking and writing about esoteric history, magic, art, culture, women and Cornwall. She is the author of ‘Sex Magic: Ithell Colquhoun’s Diagrams of Love’ and ‘Ithell Colquhoun: Genius of The Fern Loved Gully’.

Hayley Lock: An Altered Self
Hayley Lock is an artist based in Suffolk, UK. Her research interests concentrate on the Occult and occult practices with a particular focus on female otherness within mediumistic practice, identities and locations. Her recent focus has been to centre on experienced and altered realities through performative action, specifically through historical radical technologies and theories of the weird.

She is currently working with and under hypnosis to engage as an altered self, looking at where the unconscious meets the conscious, creating new systemic structures of belief. Often re – staging found, experienced and imagined conversations she appropriates, re – imagines and mirrors back a pseudo fantastical world where visions are commonplace and imagination is rife, revealing often, a dark world in perpetual crisis.

Age Recommendation

16+

Price

Standard £18 • Concessions £14 

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