Guisers brings together new and recent work by Libby Bove, Lucy Wright, and Tom Platt—three artists whose practices explore the boundaries of folklore, ritual and contemporary myth-making. Taking its title from the northern tradition of "guising"—a form of seasonal disguise and festive performance—the exhibition revels in the playful and symbolic transformation of self and environment through costume, performance and sculpture.

​

Costume has long been integral to Libby Bove’s multi-disciplinary practice, which repositions folk custom and magical practice within everyday life. Working across ceramics, textiles, found objects, and documentary strategies, her works weave constructed myths into plausible artefacts and performances. Drawing on traditional craft and archival methodologies, Bove's sculptural costumes and masks are activated through photographic tableaux and ritualised documentation—field recordings, folk songs and ‘historic’ texts—blurring fact and fiction in surreal, speculative landscapes. In her ongoing body of work Roadside Magic, she imagines a rural belief system where plant knowledge and magical rites are repurposed for vehicle maintenance. The customs she proposes—Cone Dancers, Gasket Blessings, Garage Pageants—are acts of repair, set against the backdrop of M.O.T. stations and the rhythms of seasonal labour. Visitors to Guisers are invited to don replicas of these Roadlore costumes and enact their own rituals in front of a garage façade from Twerton, a location with its own reputed history of Roadside Magic.

​

Lucy Wright’s work similarly explores how contemporary communities might inhabit and reimagine folkloric practices. As both artist and researcher, she draws on more than a decade of scholarship into overlooked and often female-led traditions, crafting participatory frameworks for new customs to emerge. Her series Future Folk Archetypes draws attention to working-class and urban identities—particularly in the North of England—that have historically been excluded from the accepted folk canon. In projects such as Hedge Morris Dancing and Dusking, Wright offers inclusive, DIY invitations to dance, reflect, and mark the passing of time. She reclaims the affective power of tradition—its ability to bind, restore and challenge—while interrogating who gets to participate and whose stories are preserved. Through objects, texts and performance scores, Wright’s contributions to Guisers ask what it means to encounter folklore remotely—through archives, imagination, or memory—and how personal rituals can become forms of resistance or repair. Her work invites us to step sideways into our own invented traditions.

​

Tom Platt’s sculptural and painterly works operate at the intersection of bodily expression, symbolic transformation, and consumer critique. His hybrid objects—often grotesque, playful and materially ambiguous—combine traditional craft with discarded materials to form costumed avatars or embodied metaphors. These figures express the push and pull between the joy of making and the anxiety of existing within a system that commodifies both labour and identity. Drawing on themes of non-human agency, revelation through concealment, and the animation of inanimate matter, Platt uses disguise as a conceptual and formal strategy. His recent work, developed in part during a residency at PADA Studios in Portugal (2024), deepens his investigation into how masks, surfaces and rituals might reflect the tensions of contemporary life—between presence and absence, absurdity and belief.

​

Together, the works in Guisers stage a kind of celebratory interference—where invented customs collide with rural settings, and tradition becomes a malleable, performative tool. Whether through speculative belief systems, reimagined dance rituals, or tactile sculptural relics, the artists explore how folklore might be revived, rewritten or entirely fabricated—and how its transformative power endures.