London Fortean Society:
Art / Magic / Lore
29th June 2024 · 11:00am - 6:00pm
Doors open: 10:30am
In person
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 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.
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.
Amy Hale: Ithell Colquhoun: Landscape and Love
Amy Hale – “This current drew you”: Ithell Colquhoun’s erotic energies and sacred landscapes
Between 1939 and 1943 Ithell Colquhoun created an incredible collection of very explicit drawings and paintings that likely pointed to the development of a system of sex magic. During this time period, Colquhoun also painted some of her most theoretically interesting paintings of megalithic sites in Cornwall, exploring the notion of subterranean energies welling up from under the earth. It is very likely that these two projects were connected for Colquhoun, becoming an expression of her animism and also part of a wider investigation of the vital energies that can be harnessed and exchanged between people and with the earth. This explicitly illustrated talk will compare images from Colquhoun’s erotic corpus and some of her images of sacred landscapes, exploring ideas about energy exchange and union with the divine in all its guises.
Dr. Amy Hale is an Atlanta-based writer, curator, 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.
Thomas Sharp, Marc Spicer & Rosey Trickett: Circling the Square Mile
On Leap Day, February 29th, 2020, thirty people placed 100 handcrafted bronze mushrooms in a perfect cirlce around the City of London, the Square Mile, the dark heart of the country’s financial operations. The economy crashed the following week. On Leap Day 2024 we did it again, reweirding the world’s largest faery ring. And Leap Day 2028 is already marked in our diaries.
This is a binding. Necessary because all evidence points to the fact that City Traders are the faery folk the old tales warned us about. Poet Thomas Sharp and Creative Directors Rosey Trickett and Marc Spicer explain.
Site-Specific Performance: Aliki Karveli
Aliki Karveli is a Greek-born, London-based interdisciplinary artist, approaching art as a tool for transformation and inner alchemy. They explore hypnotic and visceral states through performance, the tactility/materiality of sound, the intuitive voice, and Butoh-informed, primal movement. Exhibiting since 2008, performing since 2019 under the artist name Black Arrows.
Age Recommendation:16+
Price: Standard £18 • Concessions £14
Access Information
Due to the age and Grade II listing of the building, there is no lift access to rooms above the ground floor.
All the ground-floor rooms are fully accessible by wheelchair. Main Hall (street access, step-free), Brockway Room (street access, step-free), Bertrand Russell Room (street access, shallow ramp), Hive Cafe (street access, step-free), There is also an accessible toilet on the ground floor opposite the Brockway Room.
Other events that may interest you:
Further Info
If you have any accessibility enquiries, please contact us at info@conwayhall.org.uk / 020 7405 1818.