Folk Art In Bakewell and London

The appearance of carpet beetle has made it difficult to explore the costume collection at the Old House Museum in the way that I had hoped when I started this blog. Outfits and items that I had hoped to photograph and write about are packed and ready for the freezer and it will certainly be months before the process is complete. Last week I made a trip to Tate Britain to catch the British Folk Art exhibition there before it finished.There's been a process of evaluating where folk art sits in the scheme of things in the contemporary art world. Jeremy Deller has explored the use of archive film, photos and images as well as calendar customs in his work as an artist. Simon Costin's Museum of British Folklore, which doesn't have a physical home or base, takes folk art further afield through temporary exhibitions. As with all aspects of folk culture, there is always debate as to how to identify and evaluate what it is and what it does. Craft overlaps art, design and architecture and music hall songs overlay traditional ballads. It's a fascinating topic for discussion and the exhibition at the Tate addressed some of these issues without coming to any hard and fast conclusions. I was lucky enough to take a course in folk life studies as an undergraduate and later to study for an MA in Folklore and Cultural Tradition. When the Old House Museum was first planned it was described as a folk life museum. Beamish in the North East, St Fagans in Wales, Shibden Hall in Halifax and more locally places like Abbeydale Industrial Hamlet and Wortley Top Forge were also presenting themselves in this way, showing traditional homes, workshops, interiors and artefacts in a life like context rather than museum cabinets. As I went round the Tate's exhibition I realised that the Old House Museum still maintains this folk life approach. At the Tate there were quilts and samplers, embroideries and patchworks, shop signs and pottery,gingerbread moulds and butter pats,similar to displays in the Old House. We may not have corn dollies and carved ship's figureheads in the Museum but we do have home made toys, rag rugs and White Watson geology plaques. There were even photos of well dressing at Tideswell and scarecrow competitions. The British Folk Art exhibition has had a national and international reach to a huge audience. Over the next few weeks I plan to share some of the things on our doorstep as a way of exploring folk art through the Old House Museum.