Lexi Strauss
Affiliation: Hereford Museums Trust, supported by the HLF Redevelopment fund. And Hereford College of the Arts
Lexi Strauss’ practice includes painting, installation, performance, clown, costume, film and animation.
She’s a lecturer in Fine Art at Hereford College of Art and an activist clown. Funded by ACE and the Elmley Foundation she studied clown, fool and bouffant for ongoing research around the relationship between trauma and humour.
Other work includes: ‘The Lady Doctors’, melding queer cabaret with rural church hall bazaar, The ‘Clown Choir’ (with Lucy Hopkins), connecting, disrupting and leaving curious impressions in public. She also collaborates with composers and musicians to create theatrical installations that animate her paintings via light projections.
Her paintings are exhibited widely, including the John Moore’s Painting Prize and Jerwood Drawing Prize, and may be seen in the Women’s Art Collection at Cambridge University.
Website: https://lexistrauss.com/
Instagram: @lexistrauss
Photography by Wilfy George.
Wilfy is a photographer and filmmaker, specialising in documenting community.
Instagram: @wilfy.george
‘Laughter is the shortest distance between two people”. Victor Borge.
Lexi coined the term ‘Folk Clown’ to describe this surreal, irreverent performance,
aimed to encourage wellbeing through communitas.
Commissioned by the Hereford Museums Trust and supported by the HLF Redevelopment fund, Cheese Dream was first performed by the artist with Lucy Hopkins, Morgan George, Bob Slayer and Sarah Woolfenden at Hereford’s Old House Museum in January 2026.
The interactive promenade piece weaves together ancient farming practices, folk magic, ritual, and the patriarchy, taking inspiration from Hereford museum’s legendary two-headed calf exhibit.
Guided by the anarchic, simple foraging girl, audiences encounter the Cheese Nun (a cheese-divining tyromancer), Janus (a two-headed milkmaid who facilitates mouse divination and attempts to milk a bull), and an exhausted human loom, who dispenses multicoloured yarn and other produce, from her six-breasts.
Audiences are invited to spin sigils from yarn and sing together rousing, contemporary folk songs, composed especially for the performance, whilst navigating visions of past and future.
Polycephaly (two heads) is relatively common in animal husbandry, forced through limited gene pools, resulting in genetic abnormalities or nervous system damage during development and splitting of embryos. However, in many folk traditions such deformities were considered a premonition of major change, or warning of impending disaster. In ancient Rome, Janus- God of beginnings, transitions, and endings, had one face looking to the future, and one to the past.