A Terrible and True History at Annely Juda Fine Art, London is at once a commemoration, reclamation and celebration of the proverbial witch
The painting Ale wife (all works 2022) greets you as you turn into the gallery – except the peasant woman it depicts doesn’t acknowledge you. Instead, her back is turned as she faces a red wall of Blackletter text (a form of script widely used during the medieval and early modern periods). She lifts two wooden tankards up in a powerful gesture while red scrawls suggesting indignant energy emanate from her. Sigrid Holmwood’s solo exhibition is at once a commemoration, reclamation and celebration of the proverbial witch.
Holmwood looks to the 1590 North Berwick Witch Trials of Scotland and Denmark in which mostly peasant women were scapegoated as witches and burned at the stake. They were blamed for Anne of Denmark’s storm-hit sea journey to Scotland (to marry King James VI), which had instead marooned her in Norway. James blamed witchcraft and tortured its supposed practitioners to extract false confessions, such as the devil’s execution plan for the king. Women are notably mostly absent in Holmwood’s canvases; instead, texts, pyres, ships and devils are depicted as symbols of the witch’s destruction – both her own and that which she allegedly causes.
Texts appear either as tomes, like in Burning heretical books, or in the background as written word, as in Burning log. The artist even reproduces excerpts of accounts of these trials from the 1591 pamphlet Newes from Scotland on a long cotton scroll that hangs from the gallery ceiling, diachronically anchoring this misogynistic inquisition in both past and present.
The abundance of text here references the polarising effect inventions like the Gutenberg Press or the internet have had by making information more widely accessible. These innovations, usually lauded for radically and positively widening access to knowledge, exaggerate and exacerbate the supposed dangers women pose on larger scales. Indeed, this exhibition’s timeliness makes clear that women were, and still are, a threat: governments everywhere continue to diminish women’s rights in contemporary versions of the witch hunt, such as in the murder of Mahsa Amini in Iran or the overturning of Roe v Wade in the US.
In Burning heretical books, however, the ignited papers are witchy texts that curiously refuse to burn. In fact, nothing here is actually damaged. Holmwood’s harmless fires indicate a defiance of the witch’s persecutors in keeping with the recent popular rehabilitation of the witch that has turned her from villain to symbol of feminist empowerment. The title of A Fire used to burn women in Dernburg indicates the depicted bonfire should be torturing women and yet their absence in the composition makes me imagine Holmwood’s witches as unscathed, watching from outside the infernos that should have been their demise.
A Terrible and True History at Annely Juda Fine Art, London, through 3 March
