BOGWITCHES is an ongoing combinatory written and crafted project centred around Dartmoor. It emerges as a book and a series of sculptural responses.
The book acts as a guidebook for alternative and often overlooked tellings of the moor, centring its bogs over its tors. It offers new ways into relating to place that don’t rely upon ownership, time or expertise. It challenges the solitary male explorer/improver narratives of Dartmoor.
Within the huge library of mythologies, fictions and histories of Dartmoor, you cannot help but notice how each time these scribes of its geometry - the men of its making - are prioritised and their endeavours valorised. So rarely is an experience beyond the male realm explored in anything other than stereotype that I have ended up feeling that the perspective of vicars is held as truer to that of Dartmoor than that of women.
The sculptures invert cartographic forms of knowing place, focussing on the connective tissues of the moor, its peat and plants and moist unruly bogs. Impossibly leaky vessels sewn in relief form reflect the difficulty in mapping this unstable space.
The book acts as a guidebook for alternative and often overlooked tellings of the moor, centring its bogs over its tors. It offers new ways into relating to place that don’t rely upon ownership, time or expertise. It challenges the solitary male explorer/improver narratives of Dartmoor.
Within the huge library of mythologies, fictions and histories of Dartmoor, you cannot help but notice how each time these scribes of its geometry - the men of its making - are prioritised and their endeavours valorised. So rarely is an experience beyond the male realm explored in anything other than stereotype that I have ended up feeling that the perspective of vicars is held as truer to that of Dartmoor than that of women.
The sculptures invert cartographic forms of knowing place, focussing on the connective tissues of the moor, its peat and plants and moist unruly bogs. Impossibly leaky vessels sewn in relief form reflect the difficulty in mapping this unstable space.
