Colganology2: The Great Coming Together

I have, it must be said, a lot of interests.

For example, I love traditional festivals and customs, folk horror and traditional music.

And I'm hugely interested in the natural world, reducing waste and repurposing or recycling items that would otherwise be thrown away (I talk about this stuff a lot more on my other blog - The Eccentric Upcyclist - although I've been too busy to post much there recently).

Then there's my fascination for sculpture - particularly when it involves natural or organic shapes (Barbara Hepworth, Tony Cragg, Alain Mailand etc.).

And I'm hugely fond of Folk Art and Outsider Art (Art Brut). I really love it because it's made by the people for the people and not for some Mayfair gallery. It's raw and pure and comes straight from the heart.

Put that lot together and you can see why I have a deep passion for the costumes and masks that people make and wear for their festivals and rituals.

I suppose my interest was first piqued by attending events in my childhood and seeing things like the Padstow Obby Oss (above) and the dragon in Helston's Hal-An-Tow. The fact that the dragon and many of the other characters in the mumming play were played by some of my school teachers added a sense of gravitas to them. This wasn't just 'dressing up' or anything silly like that.

This was something ancient and important.

I then learned about the history of art and I came to appreciate just how much Folk Art - particularly from Africa - had influenced people like Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Modigliani and others. It led directly to the creation of what we now call Modern Art.

Just look at these amazing masks, mostly made by the San people of Liberia. You can see the forms that would later appear in Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), Braque's nudes, and Modigliani's elongated faces.

In the mid-1980s, when I was a police officer in central London, one of my favourite 'tea holes' was the security office at the Museum of Mankind just off Regent Street. It was the ethnography department of the British Museum and featured a lot of masks and traditional costumes. It's also where I met David Attenborough on a fairly regular basis as he had an office in the building and would always pop in to say hello to the staff and would occasionally catch me drinking a cuppa. I made the most of it by always having a book ready for him to sign.

We didn't have mobile phone cameras back then, which is a shame. And the Museum has long since shut down. But the exhibits have moved across to the main British Museum site, and many are now on display there. In the early 1990s, I went along there with my old Olympus Trip film camera and grabbed a few (not terribly good) photos of them. I must go back and get better ones.

By the end of the 1980s I had developed a real taste for this kind of naive art so, everywhere I went, I looked out for it.

The Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford has a great display and I pop in there whenever I'm in the city.

And in 2002 I was lucky enough to visit the Ambalangoda Mask Museum in Sri Lanka and the work on display - all made by local artisans - was wonderful to see. I brought a couple of masks home with me and they hang in my study.

In the meantime, I had learned a lot more about Outsider Art. This is art made by untrained people outside of the art school and gallery system. Sometimes it's primitive in form and made by people in rural areas or pre-industrial societies. Sometimes it's created by people with psychological issues. Sometimes it's made by social outcasts - prisoners, the homeless, drug addicts (here's a link to a great TV series on the subject by Jarvis Cocker).

I'd also discovered the brilliant photography of Charles Fréger (See here) and the recycled art of fellow Cornishman David Kemp (see here) and many other fantastic artists.

And, all of a sudden, all of my worlds collided.