Events: The Museum of Roadside Magic and Matter of Britain: Fabulous Beasts
On Saturday 14th June, we enjoyed stepping through the portal into alternative worlds at two events programmed as part of Art Week Exeter
Myths, legends, folklore and shaggy dog stories… there’s something so appealing about the fine line between fact and fiction when it comes to the shared narratives that emerge within and around specific places. Here, in Devon, with Dartmoor’s mystique pulsing away at its heart, we’re rich in cultural practices and interests that speak to other realms. And on Saturday 14th June, Exeter offered the chance to part the veil and see things from a different perspective.
The Museum of Roadside Magic – which pitched up on Piazza Terracina by the Quay – is an enticing travelling archive of all things relating to the use of magical practice, folk custom and plant knowledge in vehicular maintenance, repair and journey making. Stepping up inside the back of the van, you are surrounded by talismans, masks, clothing, wreaths, and photographs documenting obscure rituals, with the accompanying opportunity to listen on headphones to snippets of ‘roadside songs’. The masks worn to accompany the sealing, clearing and cleansing of exhaust systems? Vital. Cone Dancing to bring much-needed good fortune on M.O.T. day? A necessity. The ceremonial helmets worn by the Brydes of Tacho, to ensure protection of roads, lay-bys and resting places? Not to be sniffed at.
The creation of multi-disciplinary artist, designer, and folklorist Libby Bove, the Museum is a genius construction that straddles fact and fiction, leaning believably into moments of reality and spinning away again with a conspiratorially playful wink. By using traditional craft processes – the wondrous masks and costumes – and ‘documentation’ (photos and recordings) plausibility is woven into constructed myths; ancient customs, traditions and rituals are detourned to create non-existent pasts and speculative future landscapes. It’s a brilliant cut-and-shut, bonkers mash-up – described as a ‘palpable form of surround sound storytelling’ – that draws you in beautifully, with a splendid dash of the sinister to round off the experience.
Similarly reworking and repositioning traditional folklore, Crab and Bee’s Matter of Britain: Fabulous Beasts found its perfect place at the glorious Devon and Exeter Institution. The artists also known as Phil Smith and Helen Billinghurst gave us a reading performance of their book, which conjures mermaids, aliens, serpents and the Lady Godiva among other creatures and practices that speak of the specificity of place. These are not the cast-iron renditions passed down through official record and sources but the snippets overheard in the pub, by the seashore and while browsing the parish noticeboard. These are the whispers that visit as you look towards a particular hill, stand beside a certain waterway, step into a specific holloway. These are the ‘truths’ gifted by the genii loci of place. A wonderful hour of stories.
The Museum of Roadside Magic is on tour and will next visit The Digital Ecologies Symposium in Bath on 24th July, The Green Gathering in Chepstow on 31st July - 4th August, and the Roots and Rhythm Festival at Weald & Downland Living Museum in Chichester on 9th - 10th August.
Crab & Bee's Matter of Britain: Mythlands of Albion, by Helen Billinghurst & Phil Smith, is published by Peakrill Press.