Faery Craft: Weaving Connections with the Enchanted Realm

by Carding, Emily

  I just want whatever I do to have meaning, to have resonance. Having said that, what we find is, whatever we do, it seems to go into a book. I believe passionately in books as a way of communicating ideas to people, but they want to be out doing different things. They want to be part of people’s lives. Any way of allowing that to happen, I’m all for it!

  For more information, visit www.worldoffroud.com.

  Marc Potts and Kelly Martinez

  Marc Potts is a visionary artist based in the UK, whose powerful work is informed by his exceptional knowledge of folklore and connection to the spirits of the land. His work has appeared on numerous book covers and Pagan publications, and he is currently working towards several books of his own. Kelly Martinez, Marc’s partner, is an exceptionally skilled jeweller and master pattern maker, specialising in ancient methods that are little known in the modern world. I interviewed this fascinating and talented couple about their creative work and experiences of Faery.

  Kelly Martinez and Marc Potts

  Marc Potts, “Old Ginny”

  What does Faery mean to you?

  K: It’s something that’s always been with me. I don’t know where it comes from, there’s no one else in my family that feels this way. I was always the odd kid at school! I have always, from being tiny, known that there was something other than human or animal—spirit that is nature based. I’ve always felt very close to that. Especially when I’m out on my native moors, the West Yorkshire moors, like Saddleworth Moor. It’s like electricity going through me, and I know it’s not just coming from the land, but there are other things there. Elementals, whatever you want to call them, but there is something else there. It’s something very spiritual. It’s part of me.

  M: To me, very much the same sort of thing. It’s a nature-based spirituality. I’ve always had an affinity with not just nature, but I was fascinated by the whole landscape, the spirit of the landscape. I started on this path a long time ago…late seventies, early eighties. I never called faeries “faeries,” usually nature spirits or elementals. Elementals is a word I use a lot.

  It was a form of invented Paganism, I didn’t follow any particular path within Paganism and still don’t, but there’s elements of lots of different paths within Paganism that have elementals and Faery lore. My ritual work would centre around elementals, not just earth, air, fire, water, and all that business, but elementals of rocks or a tree—especially trees. Everything has a spirit, and there’s almost hierarchies of spirits. There’s what I would call a “landscape Pan,” which would be above certain other things, for example. The art that I do, that’s my way of manifesting…I had to paint it. Also, I’m an avid reader of folklore; I read anything and everything. It’s not necessarily Pagan, but it ties in. You can recognise the old gods sometimes, they’re everywhere. It’s not just little faeries in dresses—they rarely are.

  What do you see as being the purpose of your creations? Why do you do what you do?

  M: This is going to sound flaky, but I kind of made a deal after a ritual I did one day. I was in Wales…again, this was the early eighties, we decided in this ritual we were all going to take on different roles, and I was the Horned God. After that I did these four paintings…I used to be a natural history artist, but these were the first “Pagan” type paintings I’d done. They were tree spirits. I gave those four paintings to my friend, and then there was a subsequent ritual, which was all about what I was going to do from then on. It was a deal I made…it’s a one-sided deal, but it’s certainly satisfying in a driven sort of way.

  Marc Potts, “Hedgerider”

  I used to do a lot of “sitting out”…going out into the wilderness, staying out all night. You do get some fantastic stuff from that. I used to do a lot of trance work. I used to do this thing with tree spirits, for instance—I would befriend a particular tree, and over a period of weeks I would keep returning to that tree and meditating or visualising or trance or whatever happened, and I would do paintings from that. Sometimes a face would just loom out of the darkness at me. There was a particular holly tree…people wouldn’t be able to tell it was a holly spirit, but I knew.

  K: Sometimes I wish I was a painter! I was supposed to go into some kind of television production, but having a father who was a goldsmith—a Spanish goldsmith, too, so different techniques than were being taught in the UK—I decided to rebel against what was expected and asked to do a formal apprenticeship at a time when the skills were being lost from the UK. So that’s how I ended up doing my job, never knowing if I’d take to it or not.

  My dad threw me in at the deep end and gave me a piece of antique jewellery to copy. Now, my work is in wax, I’m a master pattern maker and use the lost wax-carving process. It’s one of the oldest techniques of making jewellery, and I took to it straightaway. My dad couldn’t believe that I had managed to copy this piece of jewellery, as I wasn’t interested before then. I absolutely loved it, and he couldn’t believe there was this latent talent!

  As well as this apprenticeship, which took between five and eight years, he said, “Develop your own style.” I loved the work of Lalique; it was the closest thing I’d found that touched on how I felt about nature spirits. He and his workers had really tapped into something, at that point, with art nouveau. Also, Mucha designed the most amazing jewellery…there was this time in history when nature was so revered, and I really got that. I also started to get really interested in folklore.

  I’m not brilliant at drawing or painting, I just can’t visualise in two dimensions, and this sculptural technique meant that I could sculpt my visions into jewellery. And these would end up facilitating other people’s paths, other people’s spiritual growth, as they would always ask questions about the symbols in the work. And at the end of the day, I’m learning all the time.

  “Myth of the Magpie” (top left) and “Let Me

  Sing You a Tale of True Love” by Kelly Martinez

  How close do you think you’ve got in your work to your experiences of Faery?

  M: The tree spirits—it’s all very personal, but to me that was spot-on. Whether or not that would be spot-on for the next man or woman, I don’t know or care, for that matter. I wasn’t doing it for anybody apart from them—and me.

  K: The elements are a huge part of what I do. When you look at the history of metal smithing, we could make objects that would destroy or create that were objects of power. And I am talking as a jewellery smith, not a blacksmith. Look at an object of power, the magic that it has in it. We take a metal that is from the earth, we use fire to melt it, air to give strength to the fire, then we quench it afterwards with water. You can lose yourself in that process, there’s a lot of magic in those items. You are working directly with the elements, you’re working with the gods, goddesses, and the elementals.

  For more information, visit www.marcpotts.com

  and www.kellymartinez.co.uk.

  Linda Ravenscroft

  Linda Ravenscroft is a much-beloved member of the Faery community, with her exceptionally finely detailed Faery art and distinctive art nouveau style. Her published works include The Mystic Faery Tarot (with Barbara Moore) and How to Draw and Paint Fairies, and her art may also be found worldwide on greetings cards and prints. She kindly spared some time at the Three Wishes Faery Fest in Cornwall to answer some questions about her work.

  Linda Ravenscroft in her studio

  When did you start drawing faeries and why?

  I never actually started to draw faeries ever. It wasn’t my intention! I’ve always just drawn stuff for me. When I was little I was bullied at school, so I used to go home and draw. You don’t tell people that you’re being picked on, but I used to go home and just go to my special place. I suppose it was like a fairyland, but it was where I was safe and beautiful, a princess with a handsome prince, you name it! It was fantasy, it was fabulous…a place for me.

&n
bsp; I’ve always loved painting fantasy goddesses and always loved nature, so that started to come into my work. You see trees as living things, and then you start adding faces and bodies to them, and before I knew it I’d done a dryad and I didn’t even know it! The faeries found me, I didn’t find them, and I didn’t go out to paint them—they’ve always been there, and they have to come out at the right time.

  I’ve never even seen a real faerie, but I don’t need to because they just automatically come out. People can interpret them anyway they like, but what really excites me is that people will pick out the image they really need in their lives. A lot of my paintings are personal, about things that are happening to me and around me. The funny thing is people pick up on it as well, and it’s so magical when someone knows what a piece is about before you’ve even told them. They’re not just pretty faeries, it’s a lot deeper and hopefully more inspirational. It’s something I want to share desperately with people. And it’s a good message.

  I don’t do dark, I really don’t. I’ve never been in a really black space, actually, when I’ve wanted to paint something dark. What I truly want is to make people feel better. There’s too much darkness in the world as it is, and we need to be lifted more. Things are getting really low at the moment, and we need to balance it. To give someone a hopeful image—it must make them feel better to know there are beautiful things out there and there are things and people that care.

  Linda Ravenscroft,

  “Mistress Winter and Jack Frost”

  How important do you feel the artist’s role is within the Faery community?

  Well, I think it really is important. People have their own ideas about faeries, perhaps what they are brought up with, Disney and things like that. As they get older, perhaps they still adore the idea of Tinker Bell, but when they can see it from a more practical perspective as well, this is a good thing. It’s about looking after our beautiful world that we’re all living in, looking after each other. So it’s great for us to show them things that they might not have the ability to imagine themselves or see for themselves. They can see it in our artwork.

  I’ve had people create outfits based on my faeries. I had a phoenix turn up at one of the lovely events, she made the whole outfit of the phoenix. I thought, she’s been inspired to create this from my creativity! Things like this are just irreplaceable. So, yes, the artists have to be here. Not just myself as a visual artist from the point of view of being two dimensional, there’s the three-dimensional crafts and things as well. You can’t buy things like this on the street. I feel very passionate about it!

  Where do you draw inspiration from?

  It’s all to do with what’s going on in the world, I think. It’s the way I see things. The last thing I want to do is to start saying to people, “You should do this, you should do that”—you don’t want to start preaching to people. I can emit my personal feelings into my artwork very personally, very quietly, and then I can show people, and they usually get the message without me needing to say a word.

  People as well—people that you meet at festivals. Also, I love getting together with other artists and chatting! I’d love to do an exhibition on a subject, with every artist invited to produce one piece, and I’d love the public to go round and try to guess which artist produced which piece! Everything is so individual, that’s why there’s no competition between us, there’s no animosity or anything like that, because we know that even if we produce the same idea, it will be so different.

  What do you like about the Faery festivals?

  Before we had the festivals we had no way to show our art. We were fortunate enough to have the Internet, but you want to share it with people. We’re never taken seriously in the art world, so finding a gallery in London or somewhere like that that’s likely to take your work is really hard, and it’s not treated as a serious form of art. But when you can have a festival like this, it’s encouraging for us to know that there are people out there who really do need and want this art. I think that is important—we’ve just got to share it with people. The more people we can introduce to it, I think the better the whole world’s going to feel, don’t you?

  For more information, visit www.lindaravenscroft.com.

  Linda Ravenscroft,

  “The Queen of Leaves”

  The Musicians

  Where would all the Faery balls and festivals around the world be without the musicians and bands to dance our hooves off to? There are many wonderful bands and musicians in the Faery community, playing everything from gentle classical harp to heavy rock!

  The Dolmen

  The Dolmen are a familiar and welcome sight at most Pagan and Faery events throughout the UK and Europe, and they are also starting to become known in the US. They are famed for their driving rhythms and wicked piratical flair, playing an irresistible blend of folk and Celtic themes and original material with a hard-rock edge. The Dolmen consist of Tony “Taloch” Jameson on lead vocals and guitar (he’s also the songwriter); Keri Pinney on flute, whistle, and vocals; Kayleigh Marchant on bass guitar and vocals; Josh Elliot on guitar, mandolin, and vocals (he’s also a songwriter); and Chris Jones on drums. I caught the band after an exhausting night playing at the Three Wishes Faery Fest in Cornwall to find out what makes them tick. Though all the band were present, Taloch did most of the talking.

  The Dolmen

  How did you get started?

  The original concept of the Dolmen was started a couple of decades ago, but it’s only in its current strength in the present lineup that we have now, because for the first time the whole band is gelling. The unison where everybody thinks together has brought the Dolmen back to a very organic performance onstage, which means that we don’t actually rehearse our songs. They happen live. Because the band has gelled in that way, we’re able to work it out as we go. That’s what the Dolmen is about.

  Do you all share similar spiritual beliefs?

  We’re very, very spiritually involved and always have been. We actually put on two of our own spiritual festivals per year—the Beltane Spirit of Rebirth and the Tribal Dreams Gathering. It’s a nice time at the moment, actually, especially in the UK, because you have this wonderful energy of Faery magic and the whole Faery spirit, which is a big part of what the Dolmen is about. The girls are very much into the Faery line, whereas on the male side, we’re pirates in a very spiritual way. These two things work brilliantly. Also, we’re allowed access once a year as the Dolmen into Stonehenge. They allow us to have two hours where we take in many members of mixed spiritual paths within the Faery Pagan concept…free thinkers.

  Do you play all over the world?

  We basically go anywhere! We have an extensive tour coming up next month, which takes us into Europe. Also, next year we have lined up some tours into the States, and we have a gig in Iceland, which is going to be quite nice, lined up for next year. As far as we can, we go!

  For more information, visit www.thedolmen.com.

  Elizabeth-Jane Baldry

  Elizabeth-Jane Baldry is an extraordinary woman with many strings to her bow…or, indeed, her harp. Not only is she a talented classical harpist, but she also runs her own filmmaking company, Chagford Filmmaking Group, in which she produces, directs, writes, composes, and performs the score, and even edits the footage! Her work has taken her to events all over the world. We had a good long talk about her sources of inspiration and how she got to where she is today.

  Elizabeth-Jane Baldry and her harp, Oberon

  Which came first for you, was it the love of music or the love of Faery?

  I loved fairies right from as soon as I was born; I spent hours looking for them when I was a little girl! But I loved harp as well, and the two were completely, in my mind, connected.

  How do you feel your harp playing connects to the land of Faery? Does it work on a personal level or does it affect others
as well?

  I think that the harp is particularly subtle as an instrument of Faery; the very sound of it seems to thin the veil between the worlds. It’s fascinating that in cultures around the world the harp has always been associated with the otherworld. For example, the royal harpist in Mesopotamia would actually be buried with the monarch—he’d be buried alive. In the Celtic lands, the chief would be buried with a harp at their feet, because it was considered a bridge between man and the supernatural. The tension of the strings symbolized the tension that we have as humans between our spirit and earthly lives. A few years back I did a course with a musical archaeologist at Cambridge University, and he said this was true. He had dug up many harpists’ graves, Anglo-Saxons, and the chieftains did have the harps at their feet, but what I learned from him was that the harpists themselves would be buried with the harp in their arms. We did reconstructions of Anglo-Saxon poetry with reconstructions of these harps with strings of plaited horse hair, a very similar sound to the gut strings of today.