While it is situated in the patrician and potentially quite stuffy environment of a neoclassical stately home, Compton Verney in Warwickshire has a tradition of including exhibitions inspired by and reflecting upon British folk and vernacular art in its programme.
This is fitting, given that the permanent collection includes two large and nationally significant collections of folk art and related objects.
Making Mischief – Folk Costume in Britain, which is occupying the first floor of Compton Verney’s western wing until 11th June 2023, explores the ongoing resonance of folk culture old and new in contemporary Britain.
Coming hot on the heels of last year’s Radical Landscapes exhibition at Tate Liverpool (which toured to Warwick Art Centre), amidst a revival of folk inspired film, music and art/publishing ventures like Weird Walk and Stone Club, and the political wing of this moment in renewed countryside access campaigns like Right to Roam and Kinder in Colour, it can certainly be said to adroitly speak to the current moment and numerous live cultural concerns.
Funding for the exhibition came from the National Lottery Heritage Fund. It was curated by Simon Costin and Mellany Robinson, of the Museum of British Folklore, and Professor Amy De La Haye, Rootstein Hopkins Chair of Dress History & Curatorship and Joint Director of the Research Centre for Fashion Curation at London College of Fashion, UAL along with the team at Compton Verney, the exhibition is impressive in its range right across the British Isles.
It brings together rare early survivals from folk traditions and ceremonies dating back centuries, to items connected with revived traditions in the 19th and 20th Centuries, as well as modern iterations of folk costume created for all manner of communal purposes. This includes examples and depictions of carnival dress from Leeds and Notting Hill as well as associated with demonstrations of LGBTQ+ pride illustrating how folk costuming and pageantry in contemporary Britain is far from the preserve of the bucolic, white and straight.
The narrative underlying the exhibition is far from a new one. It has long been argued that folk tradition in Britain, as elsewhere, has often been something that those with economic and political power have frowned upon and sought to regulate, control and from time-to-time suppress and condemn.
What is interesting about Making Mischief – Folk Costume in Britain is that it extends this argument into modern times right up until the present day. The exhibition argues and repeatedly proves that because they are living traditions passed on through speech, seeing and doing, they naturally evolve and change over time to accommodate changes in society. An example of this would be the recent moves by many morris troops away from the use of blackface in their performances as appreciation has grown of how this tradition is hostile and insulting to people of colour especially those who are racialised as Black.
Other examples would be the creation of Britain’s African-Caribbean carnival traditions from the 1950s onwards as a means of asserting a distinctive identity in the face of racist harassment by hostile neighbours and state agents like the police. This is vividly illustrated in Tam Joseph’s 1982 painting The Spirit of Carnival included in the exhibition, in which a giant colourful carnival costumed clad figure stands proud amidst a ring of police officers cowering behind riot shields.
As well as the long established connections going back to the 19th Century between folk revivalists perpetuating and rejuvenating customs like morris dancing, hoodening horses, the green man and wassail as a means of challenging capitalist work discipline, land ownership patterns and the economically driven destruction of the natural environment. This is also reflected in the importance of folk culture and the collective practice of folk costume in parts of the British Isles, for example Wales, Cornwall or Shtland, which have distinctive cultures that have often been threatened by the relative size and homogenising drive of the larger political entities around them. As the exhibition notes and I paraphrase: it may often be said that Britain has no national costume, but the answer may actually be that it actually has many.
Since the 1970s – though it was arguably latent earlier – there has been a tradition of women, non-binary and LGBTQ+ people challenging assumptions that they should stay out of the limelight or suppress their identities through folk costume. This is foregrounded in the exhibition through the inclusion of costumes worn by members of early women’s morris troupes, as well as those from explicitly LGBTQ+ friendly clubs in the dance scene.
Leaving the exhibition you come away with a clear sense of how folk culture, celebration and communal practice has been a source of resistance and a means for alternative identities to maintain and articulate themselves. This is something which even – COVID induced hiatuses allowed for – continues to this day and appears to be growing in reach and resonance.