Sigrid Holmwood: A Terrible and True History

19 Jan-3 Mar 2023

Ale Wife, 2022

Overview

Annely Juda Fine Art is pleased to present Sigrid Holmwood ‘A Terrible and True History’ - the artist’s fourth solo show with the gallery. 

The focus of this recent series of paintings is the Witch Trials of 1590 in Denmark and North Berwick, Scotland.  In September 1589, storms prevented the voyage of Princess Anne of Denmark from Copenhagen to Scotland to marry King James VI.  Witchcraft was blamed, notably by King James himself whose interest in witchcraft led him to write Daemonologie in 1597.  Brutal witch trials ensued in Denmark and subsequently in Scotland on the King and Queen’s return.  Confessions were extracted via torture and women were burnt at the stake.  The site of some of the Danish executions is close to where Holmwood now resides in Malmö, (now part of Sweden) and the artist grew up in Edinburgh, close to the North Berwick trials.

Paintings in this exhibition feature imagery such as fanning flames, a floundering ship in stormy seas and excerpts from historical pamphlets on witchcraft.  “I suppose I have been particularly fascinated with the tension between the attraction of the swirling marks used to depict the flames and my own revulsion at the subject matter. Some of the flames depicted were used to burn women and some were used to burn books – a reference to women’s knowledge.” - Sigrid Holmwood, 2022

The knowledge Holmwood refers to is that of plants and their medicinal properties. For Holmwood and other scholars, the European witch hunts became a counter-revolutionary tool that served to supress radical movements in the peasant class. “The trope of killing, and even eating, babies were often part of the conspiracy theories expressed in the Witch Hunts, thereby serving to appropriate women’s reproductive capacities by silencing their medicinal knowledge of plants that might be used to control their fertility.”[1] In a time when debates around women's reproductive rights and bodily autonomy are resurfacing, this seems relevant.  Holmwood has used madder roots as the red dye in these works which, as well as being an important historic red dye in Europe, was also used to induce abortions.

Holmwood's work focuses on the figure of the peasant, and how she was used to construct Western modernity.  Paints are hand made using historical methods and Holmwood has used her adopted “peasant-painter” persona as a means to highlight the links between the exclusion of European peasant culture and in these recent works, the suppression, torture and execution of countless women as part of mass hysteria about witchcraft in the 15th and 16th centuries. 

The witch hunts that took place in early Modern Europe were confounded by the spreading of information via printed materials.   The invention of the Gutenberg press in the 1450s contributed largely to the proliferation of panic and hysteria; one could liken it to the spread of modern day misinformation and conspiracy theories on the internet.  News of the North Berwick trials quickly spread via the pamphlet ‘Newes from Scotland’, published London in 1591, an excerpt of which is printed on the green textile work in this exhibition which is dyed with weld plants gathered near the site of executions in Malmö.  Another notable text is En Forskreckelig Oc sand bescriffuelse om mange Troldfolck, (A Terrible and True Description of Witches) of 1589, from which this exhibition’s title originates.  

Sigrid Holmwood was born in 1978 and studied at the Ruskin School of Drawing & Fine Art, Oxford and the Royal College of Art and Goldsmiths College, London.  In 2003 she was awarded the Sainsbury Scholarship in Painting and Drawing at the British School in Rome.  Holmwood’s works have been shown widely in the UK in solo exhibitions and also Italy, Sweden, Spain and China.  Annely Juda Fine Art has held three major shows prior to this one: “The Peasants Are Revolting” in 2017, “Journey to WuMu- Paper Paintings” (with Duan Jianyu) in 2012 and “1857 Paintings” in 2008. She has featured in many group and curated exhibitions including ‘Swedish Acquisitions: Insights’ at Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2022); ‘I staden växter ett fält (In the City Grows a Field)’ at Malmö Konsthall (2022); ‘The Commons: Reenchanting the World’ at the Museum of English Rural Life in Reading (2021), ‘Creating the Countryside’ at Compton Verney in Warwickshire (2017); ‘Polemically Small” at Torrance Art Museum, Los Angeles (2011) & Saatchi Gallery in Adelaide, Australia (2011). She has been the recipient of numerous awards, scholarships and residences.

Artists