‘Oss Mask (2024)

Summer is icumen in!

“Folk is the stuff we make, do and think for ourselves—and the radical potential of these things.”

What if ‘folklore’ wasn’t just a niche interest, but a potent agent for resistance and change?

About Lucy

Lucy Wright is an artist based in Leeds, UK. Her 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.

Following a stint as the lead singer in BBC Folk Award-nominated act, Pilgrims' Way, Wright received a Vice Chancellor’s scholarship from Manchester School of Art for her PhD (2014) before becoming a Visiting Research Fellow in Folklore at University of Hertfordshire in 2019. She has undertaken residencies for Analogue Farm (2022) and Morning Boat, Jersey (2018/19) and has recently exhibited at serf, Leeds Art Gallery, Compton Verney and Cecil Sharp House. Commissions and awards include from Marchmont House (2023), A-N (2023), Daiwa Foundation (2023) and Meadow Arts (2021).

Recent rites + rituals!

Recent rites + rituals!

Exhibition

‘Oss Girls

Solo exhibition | Field System, Devon | May 2024

Hobby horses and horse girls; folklore, fetish + consent…

This exhibition takes as its starting point the folk archetype of the hobby horse, in particular drawing inspiration from the well-known ’Obby ’Oss tradition which takes place each May in Padstow, North Cornwall.

While the traditional hobby horse is generally viewed as a carnivalesque figure of fun whose wild antics help to temporarily suspend the norms and hierarchies of everyday life, the practice of chasing and capturing female audience members (who are said to then become pregnant) gestures towards a peculiarly predatory heteronormativity.

At the same time, ‘hobby horse’ is one of several names used to disparage girls and young women with a keen interest in horses (AKA ‘horse girls’), who are bullied for their social awkwardness and presumed erotic attachment to their equine companions.

What if ‘horse girls’ were celebrated, not mocked? What if the hobby horse was femme, and the hobby horse tradition underpinned by an ethics of consent and inclusion? How might folk practices of all kinds help us to navigate changing attitudes towards gender and intimacy?

Field System, Ashburton: 1-18 May, PV 1 May, 6-9pm

Photo by Leonie Freeman

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! 

’Join the hedge morris dancing revolution!’, Tradfolk