Bath: The Circus, part 1

As a resident of Bath for the last thirteen years, I have not tired of wandering around looking for hidden gems across the city. With so much beauty and craftsmanship embedded into the architecture, Bath is abundant with secret motifs if you know where to look!

One that has fascinated me is the Circus, located adjacent to the Royal Crescent. The Circus consists of three curved segments of Grade I listed townhouses, forming a circle with three entrances. The Circus mimics Stonehenge’s layout, and when viewed from the air, along with Queen Square and adjoining Gay Street, form a key shape.

Carved into the stonework are 525 emblems; flora & fauna, acorns, suns, moons, compasses, paint palettes, books, instruments, and nautical symbols. When I have mentioned this to friends, family and colleagues I have been shocked to know that even locals to Bath have not noticed these "hidden-in-plain-sight” symbols before, giving me even more enthusiasm to bring attention to them.

While the symbols take inspiration from freemasons, I aim to reimagine these into textiles pieces, by hand sewing some of these motifs into fabric. While I’ll take direct inspiration from the original designs by photographing, tracing and printing onto water soluble paper to then embroider, some symbols I’ll reinterpret slightly to simplify the detail.

Throughout my exploration, I intend to update the blog with my findings and research and see how my ideas develop into physical works.

Making Matters: In Search of Creative Wonders

Heading to Toppings once again to enjoy another event; this time from author Clare Hunter, with her latest book ‘Making Matters’ :

Exploring craft traditions and forms of making from across centuries and cultures, Clare Hunter encourages to engage with the world afresh. To use our hands again, to see beauty in unexpected places, to play and protest and embrace imaginative possibilities. From paper crafts to wonders made from light and snow, she searches for creative delight - making lanterns, puppets and pinhole cameras.

To begin the discussion of her new book, Clare introduced the evening with a simple workshop on making origami cranes - a symbol of good fortune and happiness. The process of creating and learning in a group setting sets the scene for the concept of ‘Making Matters’; “participants and spectators can, for a little while, transcend their everyday lives and experience a moment of collective wonder”.

The small things we make are unique. They are intimate, creative expressions of celebration, commemoration and connection; imaginative, tactile markers of our human existence.

Clare writes about passing on knowledge and confidence to communities and striving to host workshops in public settings to share the process with as many people as possible. She notes that when crafting in a public space, people often approach with curiosity about what is being made, or share nostalgic stories of childhood crafts. With this simple act of crafting, it can connect people in a unique way; it can bridge the gap between cultures and languages and provide a space that welcomes people of all backgrounds, genders, and abilities. Craft, and making, has its own language that doesn’t speak through words but instead communicates through processes and materials. It can provide a space for individuals who are looking for an outlet that lets them express themselves without talking and “through them we can journey beyond the humdrum of everyday lives to embrace, however fleeting, a moment of mesmeric enchantment”.

Without having read this book yet, I can already tell it will be such a special celebration of what can be made with our hands and our imagination, and what we can build when we share our knowledge and our time with people to create meaningful and tangible memories.

Craftland: A Journey Through Britain's Lost Arts and Vanishing Trades

Alongside my practice, I will be logging my journey into research and exploration that will influence my work and will give context to the themes in which I create work in response to.
As a university student, I found such enjoyment in this part of my course - an opportunity to fully absorb topics and concepts that truly interest me and then reflect on them, and how they are relevant to my practice.

I set my intention to dedicate time to reading and learning about the histories of craft, beginning with a talk at Bath’s Toppings bookstore by James Fox, where he discussed his recently published book ‘Craftland: A Journey Through Britain's Lost Arts and Vanishing Trades’:

Britain has always been a craft land. For generations what we made with our hands defined our identities, built our communities and shaped our regions. Craftland chronicles the vanishing skills and traditions that once governed every aspect of life on these shores.

Travelling the length of Britain, from the Scilly Isles to the Scottish Highlands, James Fox seeks out the country's last remaining master craftspeople. Stepping inside the workshops of blacksmiths and wheelwrights, cutlers and coopers, bell-founders and watchmakers, we glimpse not only our past but another way of life - one that is not yet lost and whose wisdom could shape our future.

For as long as there are humans, there will be craft. It is all around us, hiding in plain sight, enriching even the most modest things. And in this increasingly digital age, it is perhaps more valuable than ever. Craftland is a celebration of that deeply necessary connection between our creative instincts and the material world we inhabit, revealing a richer and more connected way of living.

James discusses the ‘revolution’ in which we are living through right now; a revolution of tech and AI which is already changing the way people live and work and make and even think. This book takes a moment to look back at older ways of working all the ways of making and documenting them before they potentially disappear and partly to see what we might be able to learn from them.

Britain used to be called ‘the workshop of the world’ and it was, at one point, the greatest manufacturing nation, the world had ever known. In the 1880s, this small cluster of islands was producing 43% of the world's manufactured exports. To put that into perspective; China today is only producing 30%.

“Britain was a nation of workshops and studios, masters and apprentices; a society grounded in the act of making things by hand.”

The book follows the story of several craftspeople on their journey of keeping tradition and histories alive through the act of making and continuing the trades that were started by their ancestors.

Craft is that it is not always an easy path, or one with significant financial reward, but it is a way for people to understand the world around them, to connect with people, and connect with histories and heritage. The craftspeople featured in this book are extremely hardworking and dedicated to their practice because they simply can't imagine doing anything else, but the odds against them are growing and they have been growing for decades.

The books finishes with a list of extinct occupations - a lot of jobs that have been replaced by machines and factories, or have simply become redundant in today’s society. James cites the Heritage Crafts’ list of endangered crafts within the UK - as well as crafts that are at risk since the last remaining craftspeople who practice these trades don’t have anyone to transmit the craft skills to the next generation. Without this passing on of knowledge, the craft will become another addition to the list of lost arts and vanishing trades.

It seems here in the UK, there just simply isn’t enough importance put on to creative practices and funding for the arts is consistently being cut and apprenticeships are not being supported. There is no real backing or incentive for artists and makers across the country to make a living from their work.

There are two different kinds of heritage; there's ‘tangible heritage” such as artefacts, monuments, buildings, and sites that have cultural significance and can be seen and touched, and then there's ‘intangible heritage’ the living traditions, skills, and expressions—such as oral traditions, performing arts, festivals, and traditional crafts—that are passed down through generations and recognised by communities as part of their identity. In the UK, we tend to put more value on tangible heritage (UNESCO, National Trust etc) whereas our intangible heritage tends to get neglected.

Within our art histories, we have separated art from craft; art was seen to be made by geniuses, an intellectual profession and they were nearly always white men. Whereas craft was made by women, peasants and made people from other parts of the world and made to seem lesser. Over the last 20 years or so, we are beginning to break down those distinctions and realising there's no distinction between these different practises, it's all about making things.

“For as long as there are humans, there will be craft. It is all around us, hiding in plain sight, animating even the most ordinary things.”

What is ‘Fölkel’?

Sitting down to think of what I wanted to call my business started with writing down what I wanted my brand to represent; craft, slow movements, textures, folklore, stitching, summer grass, autumn leaves, storytelling.

As well as feeling like I wanted a brand that was outside of myself, I also wanted some of my own identity embedded into it as a way to discover who I am, and what is important to me. So came a portmanteau of ‘folk’ and ‘Ellie’ to create Fölkel!

Once I had made this decision, I did some research on the word and it’s existing meanings and found an excerpt online that really resonated with me

"Folkel" doesn't appear to be a standard word in English, but its meaning depends on context; it could be a misspelling of the Danish word folkelig (meaning "of the people" or "public"), or it might refer to folklore or a folktale, which are traditions, stories, and culture passed down by a group of people.

As well as finding out about its German origins:

Fölkel is an occupational surname for a small tradesman or a laborer in a rural community. Historically, people who bore this name were humble and modest, and often did a different kind of work than the people around them.

This solidified my decision, and meant my brand could begin to grow as an exploration of creative processes, a curiosity to learn about histories and traditions and give substance and narrative to my work that will resonate with others too.