In a field in Falmouth, a crowd is preparing for battle. “I don’t hug my enemies!” one friend tells another as they register for the town’s third annual Worm Charming Championships. It’s a war on two fronts: between man and beast, as we attempt to lure recalcitrant earthworms out of the community centre sports pitch, and between the 100 plots, each occupied by a team hoping to win one of three invertebrate-themed trophies. It’s even going down between families. “Mum, I need to warn you we’re going to win,” my friend’s four-year-old daughter Hebe says seriously.
Worm charming – or grunting, or fiddling – is an age-old art and an established competitive sport of several decades: a notched wooden stick is scraped close to the earth, the vibrations mimicking the rhythms of rain to bring worms up to the earth, where they are harvested for bait. But on this bright blue Sunday afternoon in Cornwall, traditional methods pale in comparison with the unconventional (and it’s a peaceful operation: all worms caught will be returned to the wild). The teams file in to the festive sound of Gweek Silver Band and unload their arsenals. There are instruments, watering cans, graters; a musical saw, a lime green foam roller, papier-mache seagull feet; country dancers, croquet sets and one woman who produces an entire mini cocktail bar, her silver shaker her tool, its spoils perhaps more of a motivation than the official artist-made prizes.
One team prepares their complex worm-charming apparatus.
While everyone sets up, they can get a worm caricature portrait or a temporary worm tattoo, and learn how to build a bug hotel. Some have come in homemade merch – there are many pink wiggly earrings and knitted pins, and a football team styled as Wormington FC. Last year’s championships took place during the extreme heatwave and only one worm was lured from the baked ground, but this year’s verdant grass teems with promise. The frisky atmosphere resembles a trippy intergenerational village fete, or “a Wes Anderson film”, as one man observes.
The artist behind all this is Georgia Gendall, 31, currently wearing a pink hi-vis with “WORM JUDGE” sprayed on the back. Worms have long been part of her art, she explained earlier in the week, over tea in her studio, a static caravan on a farm on the beautiful Roseland peninsula, and she hopes that the contestants come away with a new respect for them.
Georgia Gendall, the mind behind the Worm Charming Championships.
“They’re amazing, but they’re really absurd,” she says, over an hour’s lighthearted but thoughtful conversation. “My work always has that balance between something very normal and very absurd, mashing those things together.” Her studio chipboard walls are laden with work, such as a functioning kinetic sculpture made of biscuits and pasta that uses Jammie Dodgers as its turning cogs and a pink, Barbara Hepworth-like sculpture with a hole in it that is actually a cow’s well-loved salt lick.
The ‘worm spooner’: success rate unknown.
One team tries its luck with a traditional worm-grunting stick.
Agriculture and rural life is both a theme in Gendall’s work (the sculpture In Other Words, Darling, constructs kissing gates into an eternal loop, “a fucked-up idea of romantic foreverness”) and her reality. Moving from a conventional studio to the farm, where she also works as a gardener and seasonal shepherd, reshaped her outlook. Last year’s lambing season – with her hands lodged in “intangible places, a bodily experience of learning with touch” – pushed her towards gooier materials, exploring in-between states and natural degradation. Toothpaste has become one medium, after one striking morning of sitting at the sharp end of a sheep having just brushed her teeth, lurid pink insulation foam another. “I particularly suffer from picking materials that shouldn’t really be used for art, but that’s part of it,” she says, her knuckles flecked with soil. “It reflects the impermanence and ever-changingness of life.” (Almost perfectly on time, a bit of spaghetti falls off the biscuit sculpture.)
She not only subverts pastoral art, but specifically the popular image of “Cornish” art, still caught between the 20th-century St Ives school and endless commercial seascapes. Gendall, who was born in Cornwall, mentions the salt lick, one of several first shown at the brilliant group exhibition Thanks for the Apples at Falmouth Art Gallery in 2021. “For me they interrogate the idea of Cornish art because they look so much like something that would have been carved in St Ives, but they’re licked by cows – and they are Cornish art because they’re licked by an animal that is part of the ecosystem,” she says cheerfully. “It’s sort of sticking two fingers up at what’s expected.”
A worm!
Gendall attended Central Saint Martins but returned to Cornwall after five years in London. She set up an art space in an allotment, which helped her find a local community of artists, and says can make work here that she couldn’t elsewhere: “You’re afforded that permission through belonging through time.” At the same time, she finds the romanticised idea of making art in Cornwall far from the realities of the local housing crisis. “It’s about pushing preconceptions of what it means to live and work here, try and find space here. Most of the people I know live on boats, in sheds, caravans, vans on the coastal path. It’s a really complicated place.”
Gendall recently won an award from the Henry Moore Foundation, which distributed £100,000 to selected artists across the UK. Although she says the nature of being an artist in Cornwall is about being DIY – “the people that can live here are the people that make it happen here” – she was pleased at the recognition because “it’s quite easy to ‘complete’ Cornwall. There’s a couple of really big galleries and more DIY spaces, but only a few in between” – Kestle Barton, Cast, Newlyn Exchange – “that can support you taking the step to, say, Tate St Ives.”
The competitors get ready…
Her work is also about queering the landscape. Rural areas can be “challenging for people who are queer because they don’t find it an accepting environment”, says Gendall, who lives nearby with her girlfriend, also an artist. “Actually I feel most myself here, I feel released by it.” Recently she realised that the way her work flips familiar things is about “embodying queerness. I want to make everything look at something from another angle, which really is my experience of being queer in the world. That’s been a revelation.” Though ultimately, she says, “all I really want to do is make people go ‘huh!’ and have a good time.”
She couldn’t have pulled it off better than at the Worm Charming Championships. Although Gendall sees it as part of her art because she sets the parameters, “everyone has this little space to do exactly what they want for half an hour. And that just doesn’t happen in this world.”
Back in Falmouth, the half-hour competition period is about to begin. There are strict rules, Gendall announces on the loudspeaker: no electrical items, no digging and no tugging worms from the ground. “Our motto this year is ‘Charm, don’t harm!’”
At the sound of her klaxon, the field explodes into a strangely soothing cacophony of drones, shimmying rhythms and much hooting. My teammates are two friends and their young daughters. At first, the worms prove immune to our array of musical instruments, and we turn green as two blokes behind us lure their first worm through the power of traditional dance. Nearby, a woman is conscientiously drumming the ground while also breastfeeding her baby, while another patch appears to be running a micro silent disco. Gweek Silver Band are also proving resourceful, honking their tubas and trumpets straight into the earth.
The Guardian’s Laura Snapes with her team’s first worm.
Soon, after much ferreting through the grass – thinking like a worm, acting like a hungry seagull, and wondering if this is what Annie Dillard was on about in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek – I find our first spoil, and am overcome by elation. Maybe it’s the riotous noise, maybe it’s getting up close with the earth and a rare encounter with ritual, but the madness appears contagious. “All my inhibitions are gone and all I want is a worm!” says my friend Flo, as we get splattered in muddy water. If her partner Chris’s didgeridoo doesn’t lure up many worms, it does work on their five-month-old daughter Dottie, who rests her face on its base, blissing out to the vibrations. Meanwhile George, four, keeps her head about her to stalwartly unearth our second, third and fourth worms.
Baby Dottie blissing out on drones.
The klaxon heralds the end of worm charming, and we file our specimens at the judging table, where one man presents his jar with his hand firmly clamped on top.
“Like it was going to escape?!” says the judge.
“It was trying!” the man says, wide-eyed, his face slathered in mud.
It turns out that four is no match for the winners, who snared 20 with a bass drum and an array of garden tools. (Given that we are bent double with euphoria, I am not sure I could actually have taken finding any more.) They win a tall silver wormlike sculpture made by the French artist Nicolas Deshayes; the longest worm (22cm) gets a geometric bronze worm sculpture made by Naomi Frears. The trophy for the most inventive worm charming – a shoe with a vibrator and a toothbrush, made by Flo Brooks – goes to a group of women who came down from London to take part: dressed as genteel Titanic passengers, they wrote poetry and wolf-whistled to try and woo out the worms, naturally.
The ladies who attempted to woo out the worms.
With judging over, it’s time for mud pie cake and the chance to participate in breaking the record for the longest-ever French-knitted worm. I catch up with Max from the silent disco gang, who admits that their sole worm didn’t emerge to the battering techno of Perc, but Steps’ 5-6-7-8. And in the queue for a temporary tattoo, conspiracies are afoot. “Do you think the person with 20 brought them with them?” one woman asks her friends.
Everyone leaves giddy, sunburned and mucky, and the 260 worms charmed presumably breathe a sigh of relief that they’re soon to be released back into their underground safe haven. “It’s so meaningful to see people laughing all together and connecting with the earth,” Gendall says later. “I’m pretty overwhelmed by people’s response.” Never mind worms: “I feel like I’ve created a bit of a beast.”
