Ray Malone’s
Research and Development
Supporting Document
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WINNER Best LGBTQ+ Filmmaker 2025, Big Syn International, UN Sustainability Development Goals
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A brief about the ongoing work from Uncanny Waters 2026
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A brief about the project in development
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Molly’s Masquerade
Motherhood photography
Fallout Club
Uncanny Waters Film
Film made by Ray Malone and Steve Melia
Winner of Best LGBTQ+ filmmaker, Big Syn 2025, United Nations Sustainable Development Goals
Upcoming Screenings:
February, Museum of London Docklands, LGBTQ+ History Month
March, BFI Flare
June, University of Iceland, Reykavik
Projects
Outlined below are the two projects, referred to in the grant. Uncanny Waters (UW) and ‘The Castle in the Council Estate’ at Kingswood House (KH)
Photo: Ray Malone
Artist model: Jayson Fowler, ‘The Jester of our Drowned Siblings’ The accompanying sculptural work ‘Shitting in the Woods’ was the Winner of Goldsmith’s University Vice-Chancellor’s Art Prize
Narrative Folklore, Iceland Trip - June 2026
I have been invited to present the Uncanny Waters film at The International Society for Folk Narrative Research Conference in Reykavik, Iceland in June 2026. I am not attached to any academic institution and so this grant will support the trip and further my research into folklore.
The trip will connect me with international folklorists. It will be a self-led residency, weaving place-based walking practices into moving-image works that explore water as a site of transformation, haunting and resistance. The work considers folklore as a narrative scaffold which includes suppressed female agency and collective memory shaped by crisis.
Through lens based media: film processing with different types of water gathered on location, experimental filmmaking, performative documentation and essayistic writing, the work will bring ancestral figures (both personal and cultural) into dialogue with landscapes, where water and weather are witness to histories of exploitation, survival and queer becoming.
Uncanny Waters
Uncanny Waters
Uncanny waters was an ACE funded intergenerational LGBT+ costume and performance project led by myself and costume designer Lu Firth. I produced and directed this ACE funded project grant, which ran from November 2023 to May 2025. A clip from the film was shown on the screens at Piccadilly Circus, pictured below.
“This whole event has become my number 1, of my top 10 experiences in my life”
Teabag - Uncanny Waters community artist
This R&D grant supports further development of the project through experiments with themes of the queer uncanny through lens based media. The plan is to make a series of experimental films which combine costume, scenography and performance.
The Castle in the Council Estate
Kingswood House ‘Bovril Castle’
This project uncovers the histories and ghosts of ‘Bovril Castle’ at Kingswood Estate. Kingswood House, a 200-year-old mansion remodelled by Bovril inventor John Lawson Johnstone into a mock castle, stands as a monument to meat, empire and masculine endurance. Bovril, condensed beef for soldiers, embodies extractive capitalism, colonial cattle economies and the fetishisation of strength. When the estate became public property in the 1950s, a council estate grew around it, and it became “the castle in the council estate”.
The word Bovril takes its name from ‘bo’ meaning bovine and ‘vril’ from virility. Inspired by Edward Bulwer-Lytton book, The Coming Race (1871) where the ‘Vril’ a subterranean “superior race” inhabiting an advanced civilisation, this macho myth became both the name of the beef paste and fuelled later fascist and Nazi occult fantasies. Embedded within this history is a suppressed feminist narrative about Rosina Bulwer Lytton, an Anglo-Irish writer whose husband Edward Bulwer-Lytton, author of The Coming Race used his power to have her confined to an asylum after she exposed his abuse in her own novel. Her erasure mirrors the legacy of The Coming Race. In 2025, these ideas persist in new forms, from far-right online cultures to billionaire techno-pronatalism, where reproduction, virility and capital are fused into renewed eugenic dreams. ‘Vril’ is now a banned term on TikTok due to its association with the manosphere and far-right ideologies. Taking Rosina’s story as a starting point, the project asks how queer, feminist communities might reimagine reproduction, family and care beyond nationalist and bro-natalist visions.
This project approaches Kingswood House as a haunted domestic architecture, where empire, masculinity and reproductive power are submerged in walls, rituals and routines. Drawing on feminist / queer ghost stories, where women writers used hauntings to expose economic inequality, domestic terror and silenced abuse, the house becomes a threshold for recognition and transformation. The repetition of fascist ideas around purity, strength and reproduction is understood as a haunting: an ideology that reappears because it has never been properly reckoned with, only repressed. Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s erasure, like the suppressed histories of working-class and racialised labour that sustained the empire, surfaces as a ghostly presence.
Kingswood Place, already provides a community kitchen to local residents, and art workshops to local communities. By rooting the work in the community kitchen, the project transforms the haunted home from a site of control into a living commons, where queer and feminist communities live out alternative forms of care, kinship and belonging beyond fascist nostalgia and bro-natalist futures.
This project is in very early stages of planning. The R&D will support the first creative experiments which I hope will lead to a larger community centred project.
Previous work
Molly’s Masquerade 2020 - 2021
An 18 month arts and heritage project, celebrating the 18th century Molly Houses. The project was delivered by artists from LGBTQ+, working class and sex worker communities in East London.
“It has literally been life changing”
Zichao Zang
Pictured above, artists and collaborators: Arkem Mark Walton, Ruby Rare, Nancy Hitzig, Arkem Mark Walton with Piers Morgan, Sarah Jane Baker, Charmaine Wombwell, Jon Hague, Siobhán Knox, Steffi Walker and Mills Harding
Molly’s Masquerade
St Margaret’s House
Arts Council England & Heritage Lottery Fund
Year
2020 - 2021
Motherhood Photography Project,
2018- 2019
Fallout Club
Creative workshops for mothers and carers. Calling for a UBI and housing for everyone.
Fallout Club, Basic Income House, craft workshop. 2019
Subject of Sarah Jaffe’s chapter Nuclear Fallout, from her 2020 book: Work Won’t Love You Back. Read the chapter here. (from page 14)
DWP Snakes and Ladders, collaboration with Becky Buchanan, 2024
Beyond UKIP Cabaret
Photo from the cabaret of diversity in Nigel Farage’s local pub.
May, 2015
Ray Malone article in Open Democracy ‘What really happened with Farage…‘
