Picturesqueness in Everything:Primitivism, futurism, mysticism and resistance in the art,craft, design and dress of British woodcraft groups 1916-2016

Picturesqueness in Everything will examine the role of art, craft, design and dress as radical strategies of resistance and reform, through analysis of the substantial, largely unexhibited and unpublished private and public collections of woodcraft art and design, and through exhibition, publications and public events. By mapping previously untraced intersections between woodcraft organisations, founded in the interwar years, and other contemporaneous cultural movements including avant-garde artists and occultists, dress reformers and folklorists, this project will establish the significance of a largely forgotten aspect of British social and cultural history, adding to existing knowledge and offering new interpretations of a period rich with utopian ambitions. This research will be the first to contextualise and interpret the unique, large-scale art and design outputs of such organisations, with a particular focus on the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift (1920-1951) but also including the related and continuing groups, Order of Woodcraft Chivalry, est. 1916, and the larger Woodcraft Folk, est. 1925. These progressive, open-air movements had their origins in the turn-of-the-century ideas of American artist and naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton (1860-1946), who promoted the outdoor life and Native American camp skills as a means of creating an adventurous educational experience for boys. These ideas were subsequently adapted by Baden-Powell and incorporated into his scouting movement. Woodcraft groups were largely formed in opposition to the Boy Scouts in its early years, particularly to its perceived militarism. As alternative youth movements, these co-educational and pacifist groups promoted camping, hiking, ritual and handicraft as means for radical social and economic reform. The ambitious visions of these dynamic organisations attracted thousands of members in their founding years and the support of significant writers, artists, scientists, sociologists and campaigners, including H.G. Wells, D. H. Lawrence, Julian Huxley, Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, Mary Neal, Rabindranath Tagore, Augustus John and Patrick Geddes. Although woodcraft experiments did not result in the establishment of new worlds, the organisations nevertheless developed a comprehensive vision for designing change. As woodcraft groups approach significant anniversaries, it is timely to reflect on their legacies and effects. These can be felt not only in their surviving adaptations and in the 21st century renaissance of interest in bushcraft survival skills for a post-oil world, but also in a range of current protest tactics, economic and educational reform agendas, new age practices and folk revivals. By examining the origins and precursors of these phenomena, Picturesqueness in Everything will provide fresh understanding of the present as well as the past. In keeping with Seton's call for 'picturesqueness in everything', woodcraft groups considered the production of art, design, craft, ceremony and spectacle as central to their romantic, political and spiritual mission, not least in the case of Kibbo Kift, whose founder was a commercial artist and whose group attracted many creative practitioners (including, for example, celebrated photographer Angus McBean). Kibbo Kift's striking hybrid aesthetic combined Anglo-Saxon, Nordic, Egyptian and Native American motifs with occult symbolism and modernist graphics, and was visible across the tents, banners and totems, theatrical, ritual and camping costumes, printed literature and illustrated logbooks of the movement. These accomplished artefacts survive in quantity but remain largely unknown, despite the fact that they make visible the group's artistic and intellectual influences, and spiritual and educational agendas for social and cultural regeneration. Through the outcomes developed and disseminated during this fellowship, the extent and importance of these materials will be shown for the first time.