the art of magic

The Art of Magic was a collaborative project devised by Folklore Tapes and The Museum of Witchcraft and Magic, encompassing a series of projects exploring the nature and lore of magic through responding to the museum’s collection.

This Arts Council England funded project was born out of two residencies and was based around a series of object-less index cards found within the archive of The Museum of Witchcraft and Magic, Boscastle. The original objects for the cards were collected over several decades, by the founder of the museum Cecil Williamson, an enigmatic conjurer and prolific magician and occultist.

These esoteric cards describe artefacts now absent from the Museum’s collection (for reasons unknown), offering a fascinating ethnological insight into western occultism and the extant operations of rural folk magicians, cunning-folk and wayside witches living and working largely in the South-West of England during the twentieth-century.

Rob’s contribution to the project was a cyanotype print entitled ‘The Blue of Distance’.

Information on touring exhibition here.