When artist Corbin Shaw was growing up in the village of Harthill, South Yorkshire, there was nothing more cringe than watching his GCSE languages teacher Morris dance at the local well-flowering celebration. It’s an old English tradition that’s as arcane, if not as pagan, as it sounds: rural communities gathering to prettify their local well or spring.
“Bless him, he was such a quiet guy,” says the 24-year-old, who graduated from Central Saint Martins in 2020 and is best known for creating large-scale, text-laden flags that explore masculinity. “He’d go out in his full yellow outfit with flowers around his pork pie hat.” A pause. “When I look back on it, it was quite an amazing thing to do.”
The Derbyshire and South Yorkshire custom of well-flowering, also known as well-dressing, takes place annually. Large clay murals, decorated in pressed flowers, are constructed around water sources and blessed by Morris dancers. There’s skipping, flower ceremonies, a bit of sheep dipping.
“You give thanks for the water that comes into the village, so some of it dates back to the Plague,” Shaw says. But like a lot of England’s folk traditions, nobody can really vouch for its origin story. Once a tradition he saw as “so uncool”, Shaw’s now began attending Morris workshops, sessions where grown men, and some women, strap on bells, straw hats and sashes, wave hankies or sticks and skip around to accordion music.
It’s influencing his art, too. In fact, all of this culminated in his 2022 exhibition Nowt as Queer as Folk at East London’s Guts Gallery, where Corbin’s signature printed slogans hung on medieval-looking hessian scrolls, saying things like “SAD LADS IN THE STICKS” and “VILLAGE IDIOT TURNED VILLAGE CELEB”.
During the exhibition – in which Shaw “explore[d] the enchanted, the political, the ordinary and the often mythical traditions of English village life” – he also introduced the trendy art crowd to well-dressing celebrations. “I made a recreation of the well from my village and had some Morris men come in and bless it,” he says. “It was quite funny, this group of a hundred odd people who looked like they’d just come out of Berghain watching 10 Morris men dancing.”
