Guisers brings together work by Libby Bove, Lucy Wright, and Tom Platt—three artists who explore the rituals, symbols, and speculative customs that shape how we understand tradition, identity, and transformation. Taking its name from the practice of “guising”—a form of seasonal folk performance involving masks, costumes and communal storytelling—the exhibition revels in the strangeness and power of dressing up, acting out, and imagining otherwise.

Libby Bove’s practice is rooted in re-enchanting the everyday through a blend of folkloric fiction, craft, and archival methodologies. Her works often take the form of masks, costumes and sculptural objects constructed from ceramics, textiles and found materials, brought together in photographic tableaux that blur the lines between document and dream. Her ongoing project Roadside Magic imagines a rural belief system where mechanical maintenance and ritual intersect: diesel clappers perform for donations, Cone Dancers and Gasket Blessers will the safe passage of vehicles, and folk costumes hang waiting for wearers to enact seasonal rites. Visitors are invited to try on replicas and participate in these speculative customs, in front of a backdrop depicting a garage in Twerton—rumoured to have a long-standing history of such practices. Through playful material invention, Bove constructs believable-yet-invented mythologies that reflect on the role of ritual in contemporary life.

Lucy Wright works across visual art, performance, and academic research to explore the spaces where folklore, feminism and cultural participation meet. Her projects often emerge from years of study into under-recognised or female-led traditions, resulting in artworks that serve both as invitations and provocations. In Guisers, her work builds on projects such as Dusking and Hedge Morris Dancing, which propose inclusive, improvised ways for people to engage with seasonal folk customs—especially those historically closed to certain bodies or experiences. She is interested in what it means to participate in tradition at a distance—whether through geography, time, or access—and how new, personal rituals can emerge from this gap. Wright’s work encourages visitors to reimagine what a tradition might look like if it were made now, by us, for each other.

Tom Platt’s contribution to Guisers considers the mask not just as a costume piece but as a metaphor for conflicted identities in a hyper-commercial world. His hybrid objects—grotesque and playful in equal measure—combine painting, sculpture and installation to embody tensions between transformation, embodiment, and consumerism. Constructed from traditional and discarded materials, his figures act as avatars caught between the joy of making and the anxiety of commodification. Drawing on a visceral, physical studio process, Platt explores the agency of materials and the blurred boundary between the animate and the inanimate. A graduate of City & Guilds of London Art School, he was selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries in 2017 and has exhibited at Saatchi Gallery, London. In 2024 he completed a residency at PADA Studios, Portugal. Born in Leicester, he now lives and works in Croydon.

Guisers presents contemporary folk practices both real and imagined—rituals formed not by inheritance but through invention. These artists invite us to inhabit new traditions: to dress up, play along, and perhaps, for a moment, believe.