The Craft
'Repeat after her' grew from a fascination with the witch, her many different forms: from her sixteenth-century woodcut image to her theorization in Silvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch and Barbara Creed's The Monstrous-Feminine. Questioning how one version of her story gets reproduced, I turn to forgotten witches: interpretations that contrast the monstrous figure most familiar to us, while also connecting to contemporary concepts found across the witch's many identities. By refocusing on the 'craft' in witchcraft, making becomes a way to revive these buried versions.
In this project, reproduction resurfaces through different perspectives: the importance of the body within the creation of the archetype is mirrored in the object. The witch functions here as an alter-ego, a figure through which these threads intersect. Making, understood as a practice of knowledge, lets me ask how the body is read: mythically, culturally, and personally. In the work, the body lingers between subject and object: how do we relate to a body that can summon both attraction and aversion?
Across textiles, wax, latex, and ceramics, the work questions the monstrous, both as archetype and as physical embodiment. Reproducing the body becomes a search for autonomy, at a moment when reproductive rights are once again under threat.
