Faery Craft: Weaving Connections with the Enchanted Realm (32 page)

A genuine experience of Faery seems to be clear whilst it’s happening, but afterwards it’s impossible to express. It seems vague because so many different aspects come to bear in that experience, it isn’t just a visual thing, it’s an “other” thing—an other thing of otherness! The problem is when you try to express any of this stuff, everything fails. Words fail, pictures fail, everything is failing in one of the most astonishing and beautiful events. So to do what I do is trying to do the impossible, but I believe in it passionately.

Often the paintings are either doorways or, in the more complex ones, maps. They’re maps into Faeryland that you explore and you follow shapes. Shapes are very important in what I do because it’s the abstractions. I put geometry in so when you look at one of the pictures it isn’t just surface, it’s something that happens underneath that propels you not just deep into Faeryland but out into the cosmos. What I try to do is something mystical.

Faery art in particular needs to be expressive of—well, of Faery! People have a preconceived idea of what they should be, and they don’t like anything that challenges that idea. But the idea is incredibly recent, faeries have been with us forever and been part of our spiritual life as well as part of our cultural life.

I’ve been thinking of this a lot—obviously with my own work, thinking about the journey of our relationship with Faery—and it seems to me that it all changed around the Industrial Revolution. There’s this idea of trying to tame nature, and that’s perhaps when we started trying to tame faeries too…

B: I haven’t got an answer to that, that really fascinates me. It does seem to me that the Industrial Revolution is a bit of a watershed. There is lots of folklore evidence of faeries and Faery creatures that are in the country in that period, but not any evidence of them being in the cotton mills, for instance, and there should be. Did people, as they moved from the country, bring spirits with them or not? They don’t seem to, or it’s been hidden. They don’t seem to show up in the industrial landscape.

W: Too much iron…

Wendy Froud, “Bad Faery”

You’ve seen them on the streets of America—in an urban environment?

W: Very much so!

B: Always. One of the ones that was odd, I can’t remember exactly where it was but it was on the East Coast. I was walking down the street and I felt there were leprechauns around. I thought, “That’s really stupid, why would there be leprechauns on the edge of America?” Then I saw a plaque on a pole standing there in this weird long, open space, and it said, “On this site were the fever sheds.” It’s when the Irish immigrants were coming in on boats, and they had yellow fever. They were put in the sheds to die, basically, to isolate them. They brought the leprechauns with them!

That’s interesting, isn’t it, because we know that faeries are connected to the land but clearly they are also connected to us ancestrally…

B: It does seem that people bring their faeries with them, because I had another experience around San Francisco which was again a leprechaun, but he was on the edge of a field and a wood and my conversations with him were always on the edge of the day, always the morning, sitting there with a cup of coffee and thinking about things. The actual physical place was a hundred yards away from where I was sitting, but there was a conversation that would happen with a leprechaun. It was distinctly a leprechaun, with all the accoutrements—the tricorn hat became quite important in his communications with me. It was just fascinating. But it was a leprechaun! Why? But you can’t question this stuff—you can try, but you just have to trust it. If you don’t get it, it’s you being stupid because there’ll be a moment where there’ll be some revelation and you’ll think, “Yes, of course! That’s what it was trying to say!”

Is it that the spirits travel with people, do you think, or is it that the spirits of that place choose familiar forms from our own subconscious, or based on the people they’ve had contact with, to communicate with us?

W: It could be either one…probably both…

B: Yes, absolutely both. The pure energy is unintelligible; you need form, you need some intelligible form.

W: That’s why we can portray things.

B: So either you can provide the form as the human aspect, or they provide the form. Sometimes the form is truly expressive of its nature, and sometimes its form is not an expression of its nature, it’s just a way of allowing you into the space so that you can understand its inner nature.

Like a mask?

B: Yes.

Do you have practices that maintain your connection with Faery?

W: We do leave offerings in the garden, yes. But I think that because of where we live, because that energy is just a constant here with us, we don’t have to be conscious of it all the time. We really do just live with it, and it’s a part of where we live. I think that if we moved, or if we were in another place for long enough, we’d have to be more aware of it and very consciously try to communicate. Whereas here, we don’t really…we share the space with them.

B: Generally everything we do is about Faery…it’s just continuous, so we don’t have to do things deliberately.

W: Although it’s interesting because when we do go out into the circle and do ritual, the energy is just amazing. We had a blessing ceremony that John and Caitlín (
Matthews
) did as part of a wedding, and since then the energy has been so much stronger and more focused.

B: They did a Faery blessing for the wedding, and I think that lots of people who were invited didn’t know what to expect, and everybody was amazed.

W: And I think a lot of people felt that they were restating their own vow at the same time, so it was like a collective blessing for everyone. It was wonderful.

B: Also, people tend to think faeries are “airy fairy,” and what was happening was a reconnection to the land itself—people felt they were connected to their own landscape. People just love that, they were moved by it.

Do you have particular beings that you work with or is it a variety of beings that come forward at different times?

W: For me they just come forward when they need to; I don’t have one that’s there to help all the time. There’s so many! They all want a turn, they want to come forward and push their way to the front.

B: I had one that came back with me, a few years ago, from America. It came and stayed a long time in the house. I promised to take it back if it ever wanted to go back, and it wanted to go back, so I took it back to where it had come from. So that had been very helpful. I’m not a person who constantly dwells on it or checks in. When I do check in occasionally, it’s always astonishing when these beings are there and imparting something, some help. So now I have another one! There always seems to be one special one, for a while anyway.

How do you find that you influence and support each other?

W: I think we’ve worked together in many ways since we’ve been together, which is over thirty years now—such a long time! But we’ve only just recently begun to collaborate on projects together to this extent. To write about Brian’s work I find fascinating because I hadn’t really done that before; I did it for the oracle deck and really enjoyed it. We have to be aware of each other’s egos when we’re working together, really, because we both have a tendency to be able to point out exactly what’s wrong with the other person’s work but if you say it in the wrong way we would just storm off into our studios and then later on go, “Oh, you were right, you were right!”

How would you like to develop your work in the future? What would you like to achieve?

W: It would be nice to do film again, something new that goes even further than we went before…

Can it have Bowie in tight trousers again?

W: Yeah, maybe…he’s older now. Maybe Johnny Depp?

B: It’s problematic trying to think of doing something in three dimensions and in movement. I’m in despair when I see how films are made now and how you do it. But it still, one hopes, can be done. I was just in London at the Little Angel Puppet Theatre, and they showed
Labyrinth
. They said they could have sold the tickets time after time because they only did one showing. It’s just how people responded to it. To try and figure out what it is about
Labyrinth
and
Dark Crystal
, it’s the thing that you don’t see. You’re looking at a movie, but you’re also feeling something else. It’s that other magic that went on that’s beneath the surface and about how you get that onscreen. It came from a different direction, whereas many people who make movies now, it’s about money and market research and all this stuff but not allowing the mystery to shine through. It would be wonderful to be able to attempt to do something that was slightly out of your grasp when you were making it, and you didn’t quite understand it. Those films have had longevity because they were not of their time, they were of another time that’s fluid and therefore continues to be timeless. It’s intriguing to think, is it possible to do something like that again? I don’t know…

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.