#pendle witchtrials

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Studio Practice

For my Postgraduate Level project, I decided to complete a project based on the Medieval practice of Witchcraft. 

I began with looking for a text to inspire my work. That was when I came across the book “The Daylight Gate”. It is a novel based on the Pendle Witch trials and although is a fictional book, it uses the names and identities of real people from that time.

It quickly became apparent to me that this book was full of amazing descriptions and imagery and this would be something I would love to illustrate. It also is able to really show how the lives of the people accused were completely robbed of them, even when they were innocent. 

I set to work finding imagery from the book and drew an image of a witches table and the items that they might use. Also having a love for embroidery, influenced by the work of Sarah K Benning, I realised that this would be a prefect scene to embroider.

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This is a drawing that I produced based on one of the witches that was executed in the Pendle Witch trials. Her name is Elizabeth Device and she was the head of the Device family who were all executed. 

The reason I wanted to put this on my research blog is because I want to see if there is any way that I can use this in my final piece. I feel that there could possibly be a way to use this as an embroidery piece.

I thought that I could embroider this face onto a piece of fabric and then stitch that onto the poppet doll I have already made. A poppet doll is something the witches would have used at this time to harm and kill people that they had bad feelings toward. But the people executing the witches would not have used this method whatsoever, it was completely out of the question. But by juxtaposing this by using a witches method of punishment and punishing a witch with a method that they would normally never use could be an interesting idea.

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Poppet Dolls.

So, its the Christmas break... finally. Which means time for me to get my ideas together and do some further research with the time I have off to finalise my idea.

The first thing I decided to do was find out exactly what a poppet doll is and therefore this can inform my work and it can be more in keeping with the time frame that it is from. I found an excellent website that was full of useful explanations on what exactly a poppet doll was and its uses. 

“A poppet is, for lack of a better term, a voodoo doll. It is one of the most commonly used implements in sympathetic magick, which entails the idea that “like creates like”. Thus, if you create a poppet of a person, anything to do to that poppet will affect the person it represents. Poppets are especially useful for spells that attract (or keep) a lover, heal, or banish. They can be used anytime you need to affect a specific person. Usually, a poppet is made out of cloth, but it can also be made out of clay, wood, wax, or other materials. It is can be filled with herbs consistent to the purpose of the spell and a few personal items (called taglocks, but more on them later) that tie the subject of the spell to the doll. Of course, you can always use your creativity and add your own stuff. If you don’t feel like using all those herbs, you could add some “filler”, such as cotton. Once you have your poppet, you’ll need to tie the doll to the person you want to be represented by it. After that, it’s completely up to you to decide how involved the spell should be. It could be for a week, or over in minutes. It’s your decision. So exactly how can a poppet be used in a working? Here’s an example.Say you wanted to banish a certain person from your life. You could make your poppet out of black cloth, and possibly put rue, birch, and/or garlic in it. Then you could bind his hands to stop him from meddling and toss him in a river or in a current that would carry the poppet away from you, which would symbolize him being carried away from you and your life.” http://www.everythingunderthemoon.net/spells/all-about-poppets.htm

It also had a chart based on what sort of fabric you should use based on what you wanted to use the poppet doll for. 

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I completed an embroidery as a practice and to show my tutor based on a scene from “The Daylight Gate”, where they describe the work space of “Alice Nutter”. The case of Alice Nutter is real and she was a witch who was tried and executed in the Pendle Witch trials. Her and her family were all burned at the stake. 

I wanted to embroider something that wasn’t too obvious for the reader and gave them something to do and thinking about. After talking with people in my class and explaining to them what my side was, they made me realise that scanning something like this in would make it lose its charm. So I had decided to make a tapestry, on what yet I’m not sure.