In July 2022, the Heavy Water Col­lec­tive spent time with a selec­tion of rare books, maps, objects and illus­tra­tions in the Spe­cial Col­lec­tions Library at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cardiff, as part of an Art Res­i­den­cy gen­er­ous­ly sup­port­ed by the Four Nations Inter­na­tion­al Fund.

Maud Haya-Baviera has select­ed spe­cif­ic war cor­re­spon­dence and oth­er his­tor­i­cal mate­ri­als that are able to con­vey a sense of nar­ra­tive or self-nar­ra­tive. She has drawn rela­tion­ships between past and cur­rent events, par­tic­u­lar­ly those relat­ing to pro­pa­gan­da and war-time. Through her research, she has found entic­ing visu­al mate­r­i­al able to sup­port a nar­ra­tive thread, and which will become part of a new video work.

Vic­to­ria Lucas has devel­oped a con­stel­la­tion of images that bring togeth­er 18^th Cen­tu­ry bod­ies and land­scapes in a way that con­fronts colo­nial prac­tices and cap­i­tal­ist pow­er. Ovaries sit along­side chart­ed islands, depic­tions of colonis­ers are decon­struct­ed and pre­sent­ed as bru­tal­ly artic­u­lat­ed forms, mate­r­i­al traces are sub­vert­ed and used as fem­i­nist amulets to bring good fortune. 

Joan­na Whit­tle exam­ines texts that describe these times of chaos, where the dev­il walks the earth and the fires of hell open­ly burn in the unsta­ble ground into which blas­phe­mers plum­met. Her draw­ings depict ruins con­struct­ed from the­ses lay­ered and makeshift shrines, erect­ed over and around them, and imag­ine the objects and tal­is­mans con­cealed in the pock­ets of shrouds. 

The project con­clud­ed with an in-con­ver­sa­tion event host­ed by Kün­stler­haus Dort­mund in Jan­u­ary 2023.

The print­ed items I have select­ed to view at Cardiff Uni­ver­si­ty’s Spe­cial Col­lec­tions include his­tor­i­cal accounts of witch­craft and witch-hunt­ing, child­birth, mid­wifery and colo­nial­ist explo­ration. All these accounts are writ­ten by men in posi­tions of pow­er, which giv­en the con­text is unsur­pris­ing and expect­ed. Most strik­ing­ly how­ev­er, women are absolute­ly cen­tral to the major­i­ty of the texts encoun­tered. As the sub­ject of these priv­i­leged for­ays, women are depict­ed as wild and unpre­dictable enti­ties to be tamed, con­trolled, tor­tured, or — if all else fails — exter­mi­nat­ed. As I leaf though the pages of these books I con­sid­er the hands they have passed through, the fin­gers that have turned each page, and the eyes that have read the same words. I con­sid­er these indi­vid­u­als and imag­ine what their sub­se­quent actions might have been. These books hold a charged ener­gy through their object­hood, through the sto­ries they con­tain and through the voic­es they exclude. 

Dur­ing my time in the archive, I became drawn to a series of mate­r­i­al dis­rup­tions present in some of the objects I encoun­tered. In Evi­dence Con­cern­ing Witch­es and Appari­tions,1 a ghost­ly appari­tion bleeds out of the mate­ri­al­i­ty of the page in the form of a thick band of lace. It is like­ly that the lace was used as a book­mark for a con­sid­er­able amount of time, so that the pat­tern, its knots and net­ting, seeped in to the fibres of the sur­round­ing pages to leave a phan­tom trace. The image appears as a sub­ver­sion in the con­text of this book — a ​‘witch’s’ mark against the dia­tribe the book promotes.

Witch’s lad­ders are still prac­ticed in Pagan com­mu­ni­ties as a tool for med­i­ta­tion and rit­u­al, and involve bind­ing pos­i­tive wish­es in to an entan­gle­ment of threads and objects through sys­tem­at­ic knot­ting. The ear­li­est exam­ple, held at the Pitt River’s muse­um in Oxford, was dis­cov­ered in a Som­er­set attic (along­side four brooms) in the 19^th Cen­tu­ry. The object is a ​‘one and a half meter long string with a loop at one end’… through which feath­ers have been insert­ed along its length’.2 Its label states: 

Witch­es lad­der made with cock­’s feath­ers. Said to have been used for get­ting away the milk from neigh­bour’s cows and for caus­ing peo­ple’s deaths. From an attic in the house of an old woman (a witch?) who died in Welling­ton.3

This infor­ma­tion was report­ed to have been pro­vid­ed in a note that accom­pa­nied the object, and has been used to con­tex­tu­alise the item as part of the ​‘Witch­craft and Mag­ic’ dis­play, despite being an uncon­firmed descrip­tion of the objects use and / or func­tion. Thus, the ori­gin of this prac­tice is still contested. 

A hole dug in to the page of Scot’s Dis­cov­ery of witch­craft,5 extract­ing the char­ac­ters need­ed in order to know of trea­sure buried in the earth. Such poet­ic van­dal­ism makes me con­sid­er the very mate­ri­al­i­ty of the book, grown from the earth hun­dreds of years ago and held now in anoth­er form. I also try to imag­ine the desire and des­per­a­tion of the indi­vid­ual who has hur­ried­ly removed the incan­ta­tion said to bring about rich­es. In the con­text of a book that col­lates cru­el his­to­ries relat­ing to the mis­er­able ends of witch­es, con­jur­ers and strange appari­tions, it would appear that the read­er would have aligned them­selves with divine good­ness rather than with witch­craft — mak­ing this absence an intrigu­ing­ly sub­ver­sive action. 

John Hawksworth’s Account of the Voy­ages6, with its sump­tu­ous bind­ing, intri­cate mar­bled end-pages and pull out illus­tra­tions, or cuts, was pub­lished in 1773; an abhor­rent and mon­strous time in which patri­ar­chal colo­nial­ism, with its con­stel­la­tion of inequal­i­ties and deter­mined pow­er dynam­ics, was firm­ly root­ed across the globe. It was the begin­nings of a sys­tem that con­tin­ues to fuel inter­sec­tion­al inequal­i­ties and injus­tices today.

There are three par­tic­u­lar fold out images from the book that I worked with to devel­op a response to this object. The first depicts Chief­tain Purea and her Tahit­ian com­mu­ni­ty sur­ren­der­ing to Cap­tain Samuel Wal­lis, who anchored in Matavai Bay in 1767 and claimed the island in the name of King George III.

This peri­od of research led me to cre­ate the video work Beyond The Woods. The work is com­posed of voiced let­ters writ­ten by sol­diers, archival post­cards, land­scape paint­ings from war zones and USSR brochures, all of which were dig­i­tal­ly trans­formed into post­cards. The inten­tion beyond this process was to cre­ate an emo­tion­al, a‑temporal and a‑geographical account of con­flicts. The work is both pen­sive and del­i­cate, grave and light.

With the exis­tence of pur­ga­to­ry, there exists a space between heav­en and hell a space between the liv­ing and the dead in which souls remain in tor­ment and a menis­cus flex­ing between worlds. Real­i­ty los­es form and frays at its edges, allow­ing for these flick­ers and schisms through which spec­tres pass. The images from the first world war, show the earth blast­ed and hous­es split like Man Ray col­lages, strange bal­loons loom, rats hang from strings like pen­dants. Fig­ures emerge with cloth wrapped faces, white ban­dages gleam, aris­ing from mud grimed hor­ror. And mean­while polit­i­cal per­sua­sion moves ser­pent like beneath mud, glimpsed only occa­sion­al­ly before sub­merg­ing in a slow and ono­matopoe­ic suc­tion, leav­ing only an oily smear on the sur­face which glints rain­bowed under grey sun. 

In the pages of war cor­re­spon­dence mag­a­zines I dis­cov­ered tiny images of explod­ed (and unex­plod­ed) mines and bombs. They sat between images of forests and faces, inci­den­tal and diminu­tive but also look­ing, more than any­thing, like nat­ur­al forms, like fos­silised wood or rock, or upturned pine cones. And in their strange and spi­ralling beau­ty they belie their hos­til­i­ty and their role in con­jur­ing up the dead from the liv­ing. Memo­r­i­al mak­ers, seek­ers. And whilst think­ing about these self con­tained and phys­i­cal man­i­fes­ta­tions of destruc­tive force, of fis­sure and final­i­ty I was explor­ing Sheffield Gen­er­al Ceme­tery, unpick­ing mourn­ing rit­u­als and memo­r­i­al struc­tures. Thus these two things began to com­mu­ni­cate so that immortelle ros­es bloomed with­in ceram­ic pre­tend­ing metal.

And the same refrain 

O Rose thou art sick,
The invis­i­ble worm
That flies in the night,
In the howl­ing storm,
Has found out thy bed
Of crim­son joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.