a recording will be emailed to ticketholders after the event

Witchcraft, Wunderkammer and Weirdness!: Steve Patterson’s Cornish Cabinet of Magic and Folklore

The “Museum of Magic and Folklore – West Cornwall”, started in 2021 as an independent and un-funded pop-up museum/exhibition set up by Steve Patterson in the old C18 vaults beneath the streets of the historic maritime town of Falmouth, Cornwall, not a few hundred yards from Victor Wynd’s own exhibition in the Maritime museum. Its aim was to be a kind of evocation of the magic inherent in the Cornish landscape. In it was a weaving together of displays of Cornish folk customs past and present, artifacts of witchcraft and magic and exhibits by contemporary artists including Tim Shaw and Tony ‘Doc’ Sheils. As luck and magic would have it, what was a pop-up museum has morphed once again, taking root in a more permanent Falmouth venue – becoming “Gwithti a Pystri – a Cabinet of Magic and Folklore”

In this presentation we will be going on a walking tour of the “Gwithti a Pystri” via a short film produced by Gemma Gary and Jane Cox of Troy Books. We will also be exploring some of the mysteries of folklore, folk magic and the museum as a numinous transformative space.

Steve Patterson is an author, woodcarver and folklorist who lives and works in an off-grid shack in an old granite quarry in west Cornwall. He is an auto-didactic outsider researcher, meta-antiquarian and artificer of strange and wonderful things. He has been involved with small museums since the 1980’s and has worked with the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Cornwall since the mid 1990’s. He currently runs the “Antiquarian Adventures in Meta Reality” podcast and is director of “Gwithti an Pystri – a Cabinet of Folklore and Magic” museum in Falmouth, Cornwall.

Curated and hosted by Dr.Amy Hale

Dr. Amy Hale is an Atlanta-based anthropologist and folklorist writing about esoteric history, art, culture, women and Cornwall in various combinations. Her biography of Ithell Colquhoun, Genius of the Fern Loved Gully, is available from Strange Attractor Press, and she is also the editor of the forthcoming collection Essays on Women in Western Esotericism: Beyond Seeresses and Sea Priestesses from Palgrave Macmillan. Other writings can be found at her Medium site https://medium.com/@amyhale93 and her website www.amyhale.me.