Witchballs I’ve recently taken part in “All life is here”, a project at the Lancashire Archives , making a visual response to quarter sessions petitions from the 17th century. Because of the short time scale for this work, about 2 months, I chose to use as my inspiration the seven documents from the period that were accessible on line as a transcription and accompanied by a good quality photograph. All seven referred to people accused of witchcraft. Whilst wondering how to tackle the project I vaguely remembered hearing about witch balls and on googling it I found they were real. They are hollow spheres of glass, hung in cottage windows in 17th and 18th century to ward off evil spirits and witches. This gave me a circular format to work in. Whilst researching further I found a copy of The History of Witches and Wizards (printed in 1720) in the Wellcome foundation’s online resources. I didn’t want to copy the illustrations but decided to use this woodcut style to make illustrations to some of the stories in the archive documents. I added illustrations of the types of plants that a healer might use, again in the same woodcut style, that I derived from historical herbals that were around in this period. I also decided to use part of the original script of each document. I made two different outcomes, a simple line of double sided prints, one for each document, with text on one side and an illustration on the other and a spherical book incorporating the same double sided prints. |
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