Weird As Folk, The Portico Library, Manchester

Like cicadas which emerge to swarm from beneath the ground over cycles which span long years of quiescence, uncanny folk traditions are undergoing one of their periodic resurgences, their dark blooms germinating once again in films such as 2019’s Midsommar and their journal of note, Hellebore.

Festooned in a rainbow of Maypole ribbons, and colour-schemed in Charli XCX’s brat green, the current exhibition at Manchester’s Portico Library represents, perhaps, a cultivated queering of the traditions, in a range of displays that aims to pervade beyond the claustrophobia of the vitrine and the dust of the library shelf. It’s a complicated dance, since, just as it strives to open up the books, Weird As Folk seeks to pin things to them. The traditions, being oral, have frequently eluded print, leaving space for uncertainty and guesswork; an ambiguity more haunting than the reassurance of flat factual prose.

More, perhaps, is known of witch bottles, and the magickal thinking that informed their use as objects of protection against the evil intent of others. Charged by the enchantments of the cunning women and cunning men who were the latter-day predecessors of the fictional Manchester-based Domino Day, the prosaic nature of the bottles themselves rather belies the beliefs that lent them charge, for all that they persist, scarcely altered, to the televisual present.

Image courtesy of The Portico

The same implicit rebuke against the hubris of 21st century sophistication is echoed beneath the annotated glass of many of the other displays; an insistence that, for all the digital rationality of a world endlessly making small talk with itself, tradition is not something that’s been abandoned in the remainder aisle of superstitious antiquity. The shoes sequestered in a Calderdale chimney at the turn of the previous century have their counterpart in the myths that have attached themselves to the trainers draped over wires in the present. Likewise, a further case draws attention to the revitalised rite of padlocks fixed fast to bridges to symbolise two lovers’ inseparability. Claiming historical precedent, the practice was exhumed from disuse by its recitation in I Want You, Federico Moccia’s 2006 novel of teenage romance.

Stories, the exhibition suggests, can be uprooted from the fertile land of their original telling, only to be replanted post-appropriation in the compost of new surroundings, their elemental potency undiminished, or even replenished. The Catholic church’s May processions honouring the Blessed Virgin Mary, for instance, have roots that tap deeply into earlier celebration of a more pagan May Queen; its calendar supplanting likewise the feast days of religions that pre-date the birth of Christ.

Closer to home, the familiar spirits of Lancashire are also evoked, in particular the aptly flat-vowelled boggarts said to dwell in, among other places, Blackley’s Boggart Hole Clough; a woodland which seems almost to exist in a different time frame from the streets which enclose it. A natural amphitheatre, it was also once a setting in which spirits of a more temporal kind were summoned, through speechifying by the decidedly less ethereal likes of Keir Hardie and Emmeline Pankhurst.

Designed to evolve and, in doing so, incorporating a variety of contemporary artistic responses, Weird As Folk‘s opening piece is a painting by Ryan Peter French, Skies And Flesh, a canvas which conjures a Vatican ceiling from passing clouds. It elegantly suggests the arguable genesis of all that surrounds it; the creative imagination which joins dots of meaning to the shapes traced by stars in the night sky, that puts words together to ward off what’s feared in the darkness, yet shapes the same words to manifest the thing that’s feared. Therein, perhaps, lies the weirdness, and therein, certainly, the artistry of folk.

By Desmond Bullen