Stitching Witches

Stitching Witches: Small textile samples begin an exploration of the visual language of witch persecution - take from original woodcuts imagery , 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 un-contained by function. Stitching these images is not reclamation. It is handling the evidence carefully, asking what was actually being prosecuted.

Stitching Witches: Also incorporates a growing series of drawings and paintings on paper, canvas, fabric and silk, to exploring mark making as a visual language to test new forms of material an technique.