I Am Making Art: Hauntings, Handkerchiefs

Can a hanky keep a secret? Can a napkin tell a tale?

Inspired by Spike Island’s exhibition, Nancy Lupo: Several Chickens Later, multidisciplinary artist and folklorist Johnny Morgan-Jones invites participants to explore sculpture, performance, and speculative storytelling through found fabrics, imbuing them with meaning and movement.

Together, we will “haunt” these everyday objects with invented histories, magical value, and temporary domestic mythologies, transforming familiar materials into uncanny emotional vessels.

You will take part in word games, hands-on and intuitive crafting, with a finale exploring the theatrical activation of sculpture through site-responsive performance in the public spaces of Spike Island.

Handkerchiefs will become characters, relics, supernatural thought-projections, and emotional stand-ins, occupying a space between the mundane and the uncanny, revealing the speculative and fantastical banal lives embedded within ordinary domestic materials.

This workshop is open to all ages and abilities, and all materials are provided. No previous performance experience needed.

Johnny Morgan-Jones
Johnny Morgan-Jones (aka Buoys Buoys Buoys) is a folklorist, multidisciplinary artist, and arts facilitator from Swansea.

Using performance, sculpture, and installation, he retells folk histories and interrogates unreliable narrators through absurd storytelling and public play, exploring themes of Queer masculinity, land memory, contemporary ritual magic, and working-class Welsh folk culture.

Johnny has shown nationally, performing at ArtHouse Jersey, Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Soho Theatre, Yard Theatre, Bristol Beacon, Chapter Arts Centre, and Mission Gallery Swansea.

Alongside live art and sculpture, Johnny presents workshops, talks, and events, previously working with Spike Island, Bristol Museum, Impermanence, Bath Spa University, In Between Time Festival, UWE, and St Anne's House.

Instagram @buoys_buoys_buoys

Image credit: Photography by Ruby Turner. Courtesy of St Anne's House