Current Exhibition (March 2024 – March 2025): Cecil Sharp’s Singers
John Short (1839–1933) supplied Sharp with 57 sea shanties across four visits to Watchet, Somerset.
The English Folk Dance and Song Society curates an acclaimed visual arts exhibition programme at Cecil Sharp House.
Entrance to our exhibitions at Cecil Sharp House is FREE, throughout the week and during standard opening hours.
Our exhibitions programming has included performance, textiles, illustration, painting and comics. Its projects have spanned all areas of the Society’s activities, and have contributed to them. We are especially interested in new work based on research undertaken in the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, and welcome exciting new approaches to the material to achieve this.
Exhibition proposals
We welcome proposals for exhibitions for Cecil Sharp House from curators, artists, designers, makers, and collectives that explore aspects of / are inspired by the folk arts (song, tunes, dances, customs, and traditions).
We are open to all mediums – photography, oils, mixed media, 3-D, etc – limited only by our physical space as exhibitions use the public spaces in our building.
If you have a proposal, please complete and return the Exhibition Proposal Form (Word document). If you have any questions or queries, please email Katy Spicer – [email protected]
Exhibition spaces may not be fully accessible to wheelchair users due to the stairwell, which forms part of our exhibition space. There is a lift connecting all floors and wheelchair access to landings, from which the stairwell can be viewed.
A selection of Past Exhibitions
2022–23: Specially commissioned FOLK artworks
By traditional signwriter and fairground artist Amy Goodwin.
2021–22: Beasts, Jacks and Punkies: The work of the Golden Thread Project
Collaborating with a wide range of artists, musicians, and writers, this project gathered and promoted fresh visions of folkloric, historical and mythic themes. A wide range of motifs and rituals included Jack in The Green, Día de los Muertos from Mexico, Chinese River Dragons and the Somerset Halloween custom ‘Punkie Night’. The exhibition also featured a collaboration with the charity Hart Club London, who champion neurodiversity in the arts.
Artists: Aidan Saunders, Beau Brannick, Bette-Belle Blanchard, Celine Lau, George Finlay Ramsay, Hannah Dyson, Harriet Vine, Holly St Claire, Jay Cover, Karolina Jonc Buczek, Lena Yokoyama, Michelle Edwards, Naomi Subryan-Anderson, Stephen Fowler, Tommy Brentnall, Yuk Fun, and ZEEL.
2021: Fragments of Fairground Females, by Dr Amy Goodwin
This exhibition explored the historical lives of females who all worked in travelling steam fairgrounds in the twentieth century.
Through a series of visual installations, traditional signwriter and fairground artist Dr Amy Goodwin reconstructs the identities of fairground females, whose lives have previously appeared in archives only as fragments. Drawing on the artist’s own fairground heritage through the collation of oral history, and research with both the National Fairground and Circus Archive (NFCA) and the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, this immersive and playful exhibition was informed by an insider’s appreciation of its rich history.
2020–21: Pageant fever!: Historical pageants and the British past
Historical pageants were a widespread form of popular entertainment in early twentieth-century Britain. Presenting large-scale theatrical re-creations of scenes from local and national history, they brought the past to life as never before. Thousands of people performed in these vivid extravaganzas of music, dance and drama, and tens of thousands more watched them.
Yet pageants are largely forgotten today. This exhibition tells their story in images and text, with a special focus on the folk music and dance that were performed in them.
2019–20: Topic Records
An absorbing exhibition of iconic photographs from the Topic Records archive, focusing on the seminal artists who have helped shape contemporary folk music as we know it. Era-defining shots by Brian Shuel, John Harrison, Elly Lucas, Judith Burrows, Dave Peabody, Eammon O’Doherty and George Van Win. Amongst their esteemed subjects are Anne Briggs, Shirley & Dolly Collins, The Watersons, Nic Jones, June Tabor, Martin Simpson, Eliza and Martin Carthy, John Tams, Peggy Seeger and Ewan MacColl. Part of the ‘Topic at 80’ celebrations at Cecil Sharp House.
2019: Lore and the Living Archive
An exhibition of original artworks by Bryony Bainbridge, Natalie Reid and Anna FC Smith, alongside artefacts from the Doc Rowe Archive and Collection. The culmination of two years of research and development for three emerging artists who have been commissioned to respond to traditional folk arts artefacts in the Doc Rowe Archive and Collection – and Doc himself as collector.
2018–19: The Fire of Love, by David Owen
This exhibition celebrates David Owen’s output of the last ten years, welcoming him back to Cecil Sharp House following his exhibition Seeds of Love in 2008. Self-described ‘one man advertising agency for folk music’, David draws on the graphic imagery of signs, advertisements and record covers to challenge our preconceived ideas of the genre. Playful and subversive, these works take a humorous look at English folk music and dance, championing folk in all its forms.
2017–18: Kissing the Shuttle, by Caitlin Hinshelwood
Large-scale textile banners created in response to research from the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, the Working Class Movement Library, Salford and the People’s History Museum, Manchester. These works explored qualities of protest and resistance inherent in industrial and working song and union and protest banners, drawing on the folk practices, forms of communication and community identity and camaraderie that were intrinsically tied to work and the workplace; taking into account the creative role of women in song and folklore practices.
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