- Charms & Murmurings
- October 3rd - November 22nd
Artists Josie Beszant, Hester Cox and Charlotte Morrison have been collaborating on their ongoing Collections project since 2015, when their first exhibition together was held at Masham Gallery. The project grew from a shared fascination with collecting: the objects, fragments, stories and natural finds that catch their attention and gradually find their way into their work.
Charms and Murmurings is the latest chapter of the Collections project. It began with an invitation from Jennifer Smith at Ryedale Folk Museum, who suggested birds and folklore as a theme, and its first incarnation was shown at the museum in 2025.
It proved a particularly rich subject for the three artists, reflecting things they already collect and return to in their individual practices: feathers, abandoned nests and other traces of bird life, alongside stories, superstitions, folk beliefs and museum objects connected with birds.
For this new incarnation of Charms and Murmurings, the artists return to those collections and continue the conversation. Drawing on personal finds, museum artefacts, folklore and the North Yorkshire landscape, Charlotte Morrison works in ceramics, Hester Cox in printmaking, and Josie Beszant in collage and found objects.
The resulting work moves between the observed and the imagined, the physical things they pick up and keep, and the stories humans have gathered around birds for centuries.
Sunday 11th October 1.30 pm - Meet the artists - the rooms behind Masham Gallery. Come and meet Josie, Hester and Charlotte. There will be a short (45min) chat about the exhibition, its themes and processes and a time to ask questions. FREE but limited room so please email josie@mashamgallery.co.uk to book a place.
Josie Beszant
Josie Beszant
mixed media
For this project Josie Beszant has created headdresses, masks, collages, eggs and feathers that explore our enduring fascination with birds and what they have come to represent.
Drawing on folklore, storytelling, ritual and collected fragments, her work explores the shifting territory between the human and the avian. Birds become carriers of meaning: associated with freedom and transformation, but also with omens, protection, death, migration and the possibility of moving between worlds.
Masks and headdresses suggest becoming bird, while eggs, feathers and found objects are treated almost as charms or relics: things to be gathered, held and invested with story.
At the heart of Josie’s practice is an interest in this liminal space, where the everyday object becomes something more mysterious, and where human stories and the lives of birds briefly meet.
Hester Cox
Hester Cox
Printmaking
Hester Cox’s work is deeply rooted in ecology, folklore and the seasonal rhythms of the natural world.
For Charms and Murmurings, she draws on her collection of feathers, skulls and other natural finds gathered while fell running and walking through the North Yorkshire landscape. Her work tells the stories of birds she encounters and is particularly drawn to, including curlews, owls and ravens, weaving these experiences together with stories remembered from childhood.
Through collagraph printmaking, Hester explores our enduring fascination with birds: their characteristics and behaviour, the meanings we have given them, and the folk tales, superstitions and ancestral beliefs that continue to surround them. Evidence of this relationship is embedded in our language, place and plant names, and traditions such as counting magpies.
Her boxed pieces bring together depictions of feathers from her collection with plants and artefacts, both real and imagined, creating small worlds that allude to these accumulated stories and beliefs.
Many of the birds Hester depicts are now of conservation concern. By exploring their place in folklore and our cultural imagination, her work also reminds us that when a species disappears, we risk losing not only the bird itself, but part of the landscape, stories and heritage that have grown around it.
Charlotte Morrison
Charlotte Morrison
Ceramics
Charlotte Morrison is a ceramicist based in Bedale, North Yorkshire, who predominantly hand-builds her work.
For Charms and Murmurings, she has created a collection of stoneware ceramic shrines and porcelain wall plates exploring the folklore and stories surrounding some of Britain’s most familiar birds: tales of mystery, luck, healing and ill omen that have long inhabited our cultural imagination.
Her individual pieces reimagine these old stories through hand-painted scenes, with forms and decoration that echo medieval and Arts and Crafts traditions.
Running through the work is a personal thread: a lifelong love of nature, collecting and the study of natural specimens. Her ceramics become vessels for old stories, but also a celebration of the beauty, strangeness and mystery of the natural world.