Libby Bove brings her Museum of Roadside Magic to Wirksworth, as part of the Guisers exhibition and coinciding with the Wirksworth Festival on Saturday 13th and Sunday 14th September
Step inside a unique exhibition that explores the intersection of folk ritual, plant knowledge, and vehicle maintenance—or what Libby has coined Roadside Magic. Through an extensive collection of artefacts, costumes, photographs, and ecclesiastical curios, this is a museum unlike any other—myth and tradition reimagined for the roadside
Inside the museum you’ll discover:
- Vehicular charms and practical ritual objects—small artefacts used daily for protection or remedy
- Spectacle objects and pageantry pieces—items from grand roadside celebrations and seasonal rituals
- A rich weaving of folk customs like Gasket Dancing, Diesel Clapping, Pipe Dressing, Brydes of Tacho, and more—all imagined as parts of an evolving roadlore practice.
Come and find the Museum of Roadside Magic outside Anthony Gell School on Canterbury Road in Wirksworth
Bove’s artistic practice is woven from Albion’s rich folk magic history and her own lived experience of life on the road, both professional and domestic. She reimagines everyday ritual as regenerative and necessary in our relationship with mobility, craft, and transformation.
Libby Bove is a multi-disciplinary artist, designer, and folklorist. Her work is centred around ideas which reposition folk custom and magical practice back at the forefront of daily life. Drawing on archival methodologies and documentary, her work slips between fact and fiction. By employing traditional craft processes, plausibility is woven into constructed myths; transposing ideas of ancient customs, traditions and rituals into incongruous contemporary settings, non-existent pasts, and speculative future landscapes.
Working across a range of media including ceramics, textiles and found objects, she creates sculptural works, masks, and wearable costume pieces. These physical elements are brought together through performative photographic tableaux, where they become visual narratives that evoke both archival documentation and surreal fever dreams. Authenticity, and the potential for the work to be believable, is integral to her practice; physical works are often accompanied by ‘field’ recordings, ‘documentation’ of folk songs, and descriptive ‘historic’ texts, all aimed at crafting a palpable form of surround sound storytelling.
A central theme within her practice is Roadside Magic, an imagined construct where plant knowledge, magic and ritual play essential roles in the repair and maintenance of vehicles. Inspired by Albions rich history of folk magic, alongside her own lived experience of life on the road, both professionally and domestically. Roadside Magic, seeks to re-establish the valuable role of everyday ritual.
