You can listen to the podcast on the exhibition’s dedicated website, Waking the Witch is a touring exhibition curated by Legion Projects, with support from Arts Council England, and will be on display at 20-21 until 23 March 2019.Ģ0-21 Visual Arts Centre is on Church Square in Scunthorpe. Serena Korda, Candice Lin, Katarzyna Majak, Lucy Stein, Ayesha Tan Jones and Cathy Ward.Īs part of the exhibition, a podcast has been created called ‘A Common Craft’, to give visitors more insight into the world of witchcraft through interviews, music and storytelling. Looking to symbols, tools and the coven as a space for focusing collective intent, the artists in this exhibition explore the path of the witch as one for how we can connect with the earth and each other.Īrtists featured in the exhibition are Ben Jeans Houghton, Verity Birt, Anna Bunting Branch, Nadine Byrne, Mary Beth Edelson, Fiona Finnegan, Blue Firth, Fourthland, Georgia Horgan. Historically persecuted as an outsider, the witch has been taken on by artists as a challenging force to prevailing norms and as a symbol of dissidence. As gatekeepers to altered consciousness, witches have been both feared and sought out for their dealings with the unknown. Traditional witchcraft has a strong connection to the earth with an intimate knowledge of herbs, plants and the elements – as well as the human body. It looks to the importance of craft, ritual and land on the practice of the ever shifting figure of the witch. The exhibition reflects the British Isles’ strong relationship to magic and the occult with the chants of witchcraft echoing throughout its history. responding in a way to 'witch' being taken over as 'bitch'.20-21 Visual Arts Centre is exploring the worlds of witchcraft and wizardry with their new exhibition, ‘Waking the Witch’, which opens at the centre on Saturday 19 January 2019. 'So many contemporary artists – particularly women artists – have found these attitudes distasteful.
'By the time we get to Symbolist movement, which starts in the mid-nineteenth century and goes onto the beginning of the twentieth century, there is a nasty and sexual notion of women as the carriers and infectors of venereal disease, of women as hysterics, of women as hypocrites, or women as manipulative liars,' says Deanna. These ideas evolve into sexist perceptions of women as beings of loose morals that entrap men. Inside the circle are beautiful flowers, and outside are frogs and ravens – both of which are associated with witchcraft. She holds a wand in her hand as she draws a protective circle around herself. Unlike the previous examples, she's fully clothed, youthful and relatively good-looking. In John William Waterhouse's painting titled The Magic Circle, we see a witch standing next to a smoking cauldron. The subject was leveraged as a way of commenting on women's beauty, sexuality and morality. Though the narrative around witchcraft shifts across the centuries in Europe, one thing that remained consistent was its connection to women. Books like De Lamiis et Pythonicis Mulieribus ('Of Witches and Diviner Women') in 1489 and the Malleus Maleficarum from 1487 informed the iconology of witches, and printmaking made it possible for these ideas and images to spread widely and cheaply. Printmaking and texts played an important role in shaping people's ideas around witchcraft, and the invention of the Gutenberg printing press meant that texts referencing witches were more easily disseminated. 'Even in the Greco-Roman world, the legends about witches were sources of pottery decorations or the subject matter behind frescoes and sculptures,' says Deanna. The idea of witchcraft has been a cause of mass panic at various points, and this combination of fear and interest created fertile ground for artists. They are largely depicted as women in art and stories, but there are cases of real men and children who were also tried and executed as witches. Whether your reference point is the Bible or one of Shakespeare's plays, witches are often made out to be hideous and nefarious creatures.
'Witches are the scapegoats in a world governed by superstition.' or even occasionally for healing purposes,' says artist, art historian and curator, Deanna Petherbridge. 'There's probably not a society in the whole world which, at some stage in its history, has not believed in the power of witches as beings with special magical powers that can be used for malignant, destructive, predictive. Wright Barker (1864–1941) Bradford Museums and Galleries