LIMINAL ART hookland

In the talk, Epping Forest became a lens to look at landscape. It is the only royal land in England handed over to the people for our use and enjoyment. The 130 square miles of forest is the liminal blur of London, the people’s Commonwealth of the Imagination
I talked about how the forest provides space in London where the imagination can still place non-human monsters in. I talked of the 18th Rabbi Falk, who in Jewish folklore buried treasure in it. The Rabbi then brought the clay from his treasure pit back to the East End of London to build a golem to protect his people from anti-Semitic paranoia. I talked about how in 2009, a new folklore sprang from the forest – the cryptid Hollow Ponds Bear. How this new monster had been adopted by the cottaging community that uses the forest. Distant centuries and the connective muscle of folklore doing what it often does, giving the persecuted a sense of protection, giving their persecutors something to be afraid of.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Hookland was always about creating this haunted space that anyone could play in. As authors we often create spaces where we want others to feel they have lived in, but then deny them permission to stay. Permission to build and explore in their own way.

It is an open, shared universe to explore those connections between place and our sometimes forgotten myth-circuits.

The England that never existed is always more powerful in our imagination than that which was there and now isn’t.  Hookland is where all the secrets and mystery edited out of accepted England gets put back in. It is a reactivation of Albionic myth circuits. A love letter to the artist and author Paul Nash and a conscious act of re-enchantment; restoring high weirdness to childhood landscape.

It is a different way of approaching the strangeness held in the landscape, hopefully a bit of a landscape punk way that everybody can access without the need for theory. It is my attempt to explore folklore and its impact on our lives without academic autopsy killing the joy.

For while landscape changes and stories decay,  the marriage of the two – folklore – remains the constant dance in our collective memory. As C.L. Nolan, one of the characters I created to give voice to Hookland might say: ‘Those that think folklore does not exert gravity on us, those that think it is dead, these are the people who know not themselves or the landscape they live in.’

http://folklorethursday.com/urban-folklore/970/#sthash.gqIlteMO.HWMTe44n.dpuf