Emalee Beddoes
Affilliation: Herefordshire Museums & Galleries
Emalee is a museum curator with over 10 years’ experience delivering exhibitions and cultural programmes across the West Midlands. She is Curator of Collections and Engagement at Hereford Museums and Galleries, where she is leading the arts strand of the museum’s major redevelopment. Her practice centres on co-production, working with artists and communities to explore and reinterpret historic collections for today, with a particular focus on folk art, humour in art, and strengthening rural arts ecologies.
Panel: Folk Artefacts and the Cultural Commons
Talk Title: Curating the mince: Folk practice in museums beyond aesthetic display
This paper explores ways museums can curate folk practice by shifting focus from the polished “sausage” of finished objects to what artist Rosalie Schweiker terms the “mince”: the labour, rituals, gestures, and everyday processes that generate cultural meaning and wellbeing but rarely “look like art.”
Seasonal, rhythmic, embodied, and communal, folk traditions carry therapeutic and community value. Yet in their nature, museum displays often aestheticise them, separating objects from the practices that make them powerful. This problem is compounded by the classed history of folklore collecting, in which middleclass collectors, artists, and musicians documented and reframed workingclass traditions through their own lenses, often extracting value while obscuring local authorship.
This paper will share examples from both historic practice and contemporary art that materialise ritual or foreground process and connection. From this, I will explore how museums might draw on these approaches to enable fuller engagement with ritual art objects, both past and present.