FOLK ART ART

Matthew Brotherhood, Ian Liddle, Paul Becker, Doris Day, Ben Pearce, Tom Richards

Siena Barnes, Paul Peden, Immo Klink, Audrey Roger, Shaun Doyle & Mally Mallison

Jack Duplock

Sameheads presents Folk Art Art – an exhibition curated by Jack Duplock and Matthew Brotherhood, which brings together a group of artists to consider the resurgence of folk in contemporary practise. The show includes work that could be called new folk or pop folk to highlight how the concept of folk has led to exciting reinterpretations of other art genres and their formal considerations. It explores the renewed interest artists have in the tradition of folk and the artefacts that people make within the changing context of the community.

The current economic climate in the UK may begin to explain why there has been an interest creatively in the broad themes of folk; traditionally about more simplistic codes of living, authenticity and based in a community. The need to find other ways of doing things and a return to folk has always been an alternative choice when conventional society becomes tough. In the late 60s and early 70s, when hippie idealism became a bad trip. People began to move away from the city, setting up communes that were governed by systems of rules drawn from a mix of Buddhism, paganism and radical social thinking. The most famous of these communities was MORNING STAR. Based in New Mexico, it emerged from the remnants of the San Francisco Diggers a movement that had evolved out of two radical traditions; the bohemian art, theatre scene and the new left, civil rights peace movement. They organised street theatre, anarcho-direct action, and art happenings in their social agenda of creating a free city. More recently in the United Kingdom there were the New Age travellers – originally formed out of the Free Festival scene of the 1970s – became more prominent during the depression of the 1980s and early 1990s. Against a background of unemployment, strikes and the emerging rave scene that inherited on some level, the alternative community mindset.

Folk is a form of expression that has evolved out of popular beliefs and customs of a specific community; closely linked to everyday life, folk often reflects the cultural and social concerns of the community from which it emerged. With the phenomenon of globalisation the notion of the community has changed, creating many possibilities for creating new communities that are not local – sub-cultures such as skateboarders, hip hop, heavy metal etc, with their own codes and symbols and radical leanings are modern versions of communities. Therefore the concept of folk is open for re-imagining.

From the supernatural to the political, folk diverges from the visionary to the revolutionary. Mainly representing works on paper; this is part one of an evolving project that will expand and dissolve as it moves to other venues.