Art from Elsewhere: Graffiti, Shines and Genderqueer Deities

Rachael House, Crystal Hollis, Lucy Coleman Talbot

Presented by: London Fortean Society

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0	LONDON: Amersham Arms
P	Tuesday 11th October, 2022
N	7:00pm

Event information

Art is whatever we decide is art. We invite three women to reveal their practice and passion for art from elsewhere including medieval graffiti, an outside shrine in Southwark and the making of genderqueer deities.

Rachael House – Genderqueer Deities

Rachael House describes the creation of her genderqueer deities and how they ended up on walls across Britain. They are wall hanging apotropaic sculptures, some are embellished with beads woven from queer newspapers, bottle tops and stamped ceramic charms. All the stamps used to decorate the deities are handmade, and highly charged with meaning. They include goddess symbols, trans and feminist symbols and stamps of the objects used to protect the maker from harm in witches bottles- pins, sharp things, hair, salt and herbs.
Rachael House’s work is informed by her research into witch bottles, often made from Bellarmine jugs in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Rather than warding against witches spells, her genderqueer deities protect us from gender conformity and those who would attack the rights of women, womxn and all of those with less power than the ruling elites.
Rachael House is a UK artist who makes events, objects, performance, drawings and zines. Events have been curtailed over the past years, and drawing has taken centre stage, with her first book, Resistance Sustenance Protection, published in May 2021.
Rachael House’s work focuses on feminist and queer politics and resistant histories/herstories, aiming to reach as many like-minded people as possible, inside and outside of the art world. She uses humor, personal engagement and events to draw in those who may not be like-minded too - she recruits.

Crystal Hollis - England's Historic Graffiti: Voices Preserved in Stone

Historic graffiti are a common occurrence throughout England and the rest of Europe. Images, names, and symbols have been spotted on the walls of barns to churches, cathedrals, castles, and homes. The prevalence of these markings demonstrates their significance to the people of the past but what do these inscriptions mean and what do they tell us about the buildings where they are found?
Crystal Hollis has spent the last seven years staring at walls and deciphering their stories. She's worked on a variety of buildings across the UK and specialises primarily in church graffiti. Her previous work includes the discovery of medieval inscriptions in a transplanted French chapel in the USA and several in-depth looks at graffiti in churches in Suffolk.

Lucy Coleman Talbot – The Lore of Crossbones Graveyard

Lucy Coleman Talbot wrote her PhD on the famed Crossbones Graveyard, SE1, and has been advocating for its protection since 2016. Her landscape biography explores the layers of history and heritage encased within this post-medieval burial ground, which has become a place of myth, mourning, ritual, and resistance.
Owned by Transport for London since the 1990s, campaigns to protect the burial ground against commercial development date back to the 1880s. However, it is shamanic poet John Constable’s encounter with The Goose during an experimental, psychedelic writing session that sparked a vibrant new chapter in the graveyard’s story.
This evening Lucy will introduce you to The Goose and her Outcast Dead. Allowing her to demonstrate how the lore of Crossbones has transformed the burial ground into a memorial for all those existing at the margins of society, dead and alive… a patch of wild garden in a South London side street.