Meet The Folk

Alex Merry crafts the stuff of fantasy. Otherworldly beasts. Fanciful portraits of pets. Her folk art-style illustrations for Italian fashion brand Gucci’s Décor range have been made into murals brightening cities all over the world. As Alex says herself, she likes to “come at things from a side angle”.

All this is conjured up from a very downto-earth place: Alex’s desk in her home in Stroud. As she works, sounds from the high street drift up to her room – “it never feels too isolated”. It’s her “magical, imagination-led childhood” growing up in this Gloucestershire town, where her dad was a vicar, that’s the heart to her work. Alex’s desk is surrounded with books and she loves revisiting childhood favourites for inspiration: Kit Williams’ Masquerade, Rhymes without Reason by Mervyn Peake, the Australian book: The Bunyip of Berkeley’s Creek, pouring over the illustrations as she did as a child: “It’s all the detail! I used to stare at them for ages”.

Alex hasn’t always been based here – after graduating she worked in London, in the studio of Damien Hirst. Perhaps surprisingly, it was in the capital that her interest in folk was reawakened. She got really into the folk scene, even taking up Morris dancing. Increasingly, she felt as if her day job and her passions weren’t married up – and she wasn’t doing her own work. Moving “home” was partially economically driven, but it’s where everything finally clicked. She found herself in a hub of artists and makers, with the space “to create quite freely”. She even founded an all-female Morris dancing troop, Boss Morris, who in their metallics and day-glo give the tradition an inventive, exhilarating twist. “I feel so lucky”, she says.

Boss Morris led to the birth of Alex’s first Beast. Boss Morris were due to perform

words frances ambler photos katie-jane watson