Stitching Witches

Stitching Witches: Small textile samples begin an exploration of the visual language of witch persecution - take from original woodcuts imagary , broadsheet archives, the cheap printed image made to circulate fear. Hand stitching re-inhabits these pictures slowly, one stitch at a time. To sew is to look differently: to trace the line of a body restrained in water, a woman named in a pamphlet, a familiar domesticated into evidence with a name like Vinegar Tom or Sack and Sugar.

The accused were overwhelmingly women - the economically independent and the desperately poor. The alewife, the herbalist, the midwife. But also, the woman past childbearing: her sexuality now without sanctioned purpose, her body outside the reproductive economy that had defined her social place. Desire in a woman with nothing left to contain it.

These works sit with the fear underneath the accusation: of female economies, of women's knowledge of bodies and fermentation and remedy, of sexuality uncontained by function. Stitching these images is not reclamation. It is handling the evidence carefully, asking what was actually being prosecuted.