Caught on Tenterhooks Painting

This piece is part of a collection of works that will be exhibited at The Other Art Fair in LA. The collection the Earth Beneath Her Feet is the culmination of a 2 year project researching the English witch panics of the 15-1600s. During the both academic and material research of the period I visited over 25 villages and towns across England where women had been accused of witch craft. I left traces of their names scratched in the mud, or on slips of torn paper in public spaces like libraries and old phone boxes or on the ground in woods and paths and fields. I collected earths that were then processed in the studio into pigment. I walked in their footsteps and remembered their humanity. As the project went on I took to reading the research about their trials in the place where they were taken from. Once back in the studio I created a series of works using the earth pigments I had collected combined with pigments from the material culture at the time, madder, woad indigo and pitch. I made a large body of paintings with these pigments exploring ideas about the spread of ideas and also the attitudes to women and changing social expectations and support systems that were embedded in that very violent part of English history. These works are a meditation of what makes people dehumanise each other to the point of hatred and persecution, and what we can do to resist those forces that are a part of human nature. My process of researching and making is both academic and meditative, it gives rise to pieces that also act as a focus for meditative resolution in the viewer. There is a link between the witch hunts in England and the American witch hunts via migration from areas like Suffolk and Devon to the Salem area evidenced in place names and official records of the trial.