Stitching Witches

Stitching Witches: Small textile samples begin an exploration of the visual language of witch persecution — taken from original woodcut 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. And always, at the centre of the image, the Devil — horned, winged, unmistakable — who appears in every woodcut but was rarely the point of the accusation.

The accused were overwhelmingly women - the propertied and the penniless. 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 brings them back into the body - textured, present, insistent.