a re-vision and re-clamation of historical wrongs enacted against othered women during the witch trials of C16th England
Earth Bound Bodies – is the working title for a durational multi layered body of work which excavates, re-claims and re-enchants. Taking the Englsh Witch Trials and Land Enclosures as collective historical starting points from which to author another story. Cleft is an ongoing magical working, to re-pair the severence. Comprised of various intentional spells, working with site specific clay dug from the areas where women were exected as witches in England.
The clay body holds the story of the land, of all bodies who have been in contact with that piece of land, biologically and psychically – the clay being an archive of death, decay, transformation and reincarnation.
By being intentionally Earth Bound the othered body undergoes essential psychic transformation allowing space for attuned communal healing and ecological stewardship with the cosmological whole.
The first Spell to Cleave took place in Epping Forest on the full moon lunar eclipse of 6th September 2025
Thoughts on re-membering the past as a way to inhabit the present
In a recent podcast for the Serpentine, I was particularly struck by a conversation with Samson Kambalu when talking about myth and history, this passage in particular ...
Samson Kambalu: ‘I don't know. History is the prerogative of the historian and the say it's always written by winners and I'm an advocate of a more accommodating approach to history. Almost something perhaps closer to myth. I think perhaps even myth is more truthful than history. History is the powerful, trying to interpret an otherwise complex reality to their needs. Myth allows you, everybody, to come in and contribute their own meaning’.
In choosing to look back into history, employing forgotten and esoteric methodologies that would have been deployed in the 16thC and earlier, this is not merely a naive longing for a fictonal past, rather an examination of where we went wrong, a consideration of how we can break the trajectory, extract other forgotten historys and world build in the present within the inbetween spaces left by these unwritten gaps in history.
It is not enough to continue to point out and highlight the wrongs being wrought, we have to build a new loom, a framework within which we can weave a new tapestry