John Fox & Sue Gill Archive

Overview

John Fox MBE (1938-2025) and Sue Gill (born 1940), artists, performers, writers, educators and celebrants, are two of the founding members of Welfare State International (WSI). The pair met in Hull as teenagers. John went on to study art at Ruskin School of Drawing and art college in Newcastle; Sue trained as a teacher. By the mid 1960s John was employed at Bradford School of Art and the pair began working with a group of artists and educators associated with the school, doing street theatre at the weekends and holidays. The group cohered as Welfare State (later adding ‘International’ to the name due to increasing work abroad) in 1968.

The group’s intention to bring art out of galleries and performance out of theatres, providing communities with free access to art resulted in hundreds of site-specific, community-led productions made and performed in the UK and abroad between the late 1960s and early 2000s. John worked as artistic director of the group from the mid-1970s until 2006. Sue undertook the organisation and much of the delivery of WSI’s educational work, as well as being a regular performer, with John, in WSI productions. The organisation based itself in Ulverston from the early 1980s, inspiring a creative legacy in the town that continues to the present day in its annual lantern parade.

The pair established the Dead Good Guides imprint in 1990s to disseminate ideas about rites of passage through performance, a key strand of WSI work with the first baby naming ceremony taking place in 1969.

After the closure of WSI in 2006, the pair continued to work as artists, writers and educators, usually under the moniker Dead Good Guides, for nearly two decades. Working from their home, the Beach House on the western shore of Morecambe Bay, they focused on the many types of socially engaging, celebratory art – lantern parades, secular rites of passage, storytelling etc. - pioneered by WSI as well as exploring more environmentally-informed art in context such as sculpture trails and gardens. Residential workshops took place at the Beach House for artists and celebrants to be trained in this ‘applied vernacular art’.

What the collection holds

The collection contains material primarily concerned with John and Sue’s work before, after and outside of WSI as well as a small number of personal papers. Some material (press cuttings, John’s writing) dates from the mid-1960s before the founding of Welfare State. The largest part of the collection (over two thirds by volume) is a series of notebooks, kept by John, from the 1970s to 2000s. These contain draft letters and essays, sketches of designs for WSI characters and scenery/equipment, notes from meetings, contact details for various practitioners, and much doodling. The collection also contains John’s drafts and notes for lectures and essays as well as scripts and music; many of these date from the period WSI was operating but were not necessarily written for the company.

The work of Dead Good Guides from 2006 onwards is recorded in publications and publicity material about their various artworks, installations, performances and ceremonies, as well as a small amount of administrative material regarding the planning and organisation of the activities.

The collection will be catalogued during 2026 thanks to funding from The National Archives under their Archives Revealed grant programme.

Further information

Website for Dead Good Guides, an artist-led company exploring new ways for art to live and breathe in the everyday.

The Theatre Collection also hold the records of Welfare State International arts organisation (1968-2006)