Witch Balls

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 from this but decided to use this woodcut style to make illustrations to some of the stories in the archive documents.

I added illustrations of the type of plants that would have been used by healers, 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 decided to use the prints to make 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.