The Mummers

My brother Si is a professional photographer and head of the photography faculty at Cornwall College. He's also an associate at the university in Falmouth. His particular field of interest is the history of photography. He has a collection of vintage Victorian cameras and can use them. He's also mastered all of the early forms of photo developing and printing. This has led to him creating a unique service - he can take your portrait and make it look authentically vintage. Earlier this year, we decided to do a photograph together and I love the end result.

It's also brought him to the attention of some world class artists. One such is sculptor Tim Shaw who recently produced an extraordinary series of bronze figures called The Mummers' Tongue Goes Whoring Amongst The People (from a line in a poem by Seamus Heaney). 

Each figure is dressed in the kinds of outfits we see worn at ancient British and Irish folk festivals and they really are quite beautiful. Tim was successful in applying for the 2021 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition and asked my brother if he would create a limited edition photographic print using the vintage wetplate collodion method to accompany four of the figures and a full-size straw figure. 

I popped along to the RA to have a look and to take these photographs. The work - by both men - was fantastic and drew big crowds.

The other full-size figure is called Lifting the Curse. It was intended as an antidote to the curse that artists Gilbert and George issued to the Royal Academy and its members after plans to show their work were reportedly turned down. The duo retuned their medals and certificates and gave up their RA membership stating: 'We curse the Royal Academy and all its members.' As a member of the RA Tim decided to fight back, creating a totem figure from tree branches tied to a welded metal frame, with a belly full of charcoal wrapped in blanket. It also features a heart made from charred wood, lacerated and bound in copper. On the penultimate day of its completion, a shamanic practitioner carried out a ritual connecting, 'giving focus and potency to the work.'

Shaw now lives and works in Cornwall but is originally from Belfast and it was inspired to create the Mummers after seeing the Armagh Rhymers. As he says on his website (here): 'I first saw The Armagh Rhymers perform ten years ago on Stephen's Day deep within rural Armagh. It was a remarkable winter scene: heavy snow had fallen upon a frozen grey landscape and the Mummers rhymed and sang their way from door to door, dressed in masks and skirts made from straw. They appeared primitive and other- worldly. I have watched The Armagh Rhymers perform several times since. Through conversations with the mumming community and through my own creative journey, I have been trying to find the essence and the meaning of these customs. For one member of the County Fermanagh mumming community, the act of mumming is very much about performing, through rhyme, rituals that 'put things right for future surety and mark the passing of time: the dying back of winter and the rebirth of spring.' Universal themes of death and resurrection come to mind.' 

The straw figures also remind me of the costumes seen at the annual Whittlesey Straw Bear Festival in Cambridgeshire. Nobody really knows for sure the true origins of this bizarre tradition. The earliest UK reports of the event trace back to 1882 when the ploughmen were reported to be parading a straw bear around the town for beer, tobacco and beef during this lean period, in farming. Whatever the origins, the tradition was stopped in 1909 as it appears that an over-zealous police inspector had forbidden 'Straw Bears' as a form of begging. But it's now back in force and very popular.

There are many such straw costumes around the world (some of which feature in the Wilder Mann book I featured here.)

 

May these fantastic traditions never die. They link us to the land and the passing of the seasons. 

The more we divorce ourselves from the natural world the poorer we become as a society and a species.