FAMILIARS & APPARAITIONS

TIM WHITE & GISELLE BOLOTIN

19 July - 9 AUGUST

Opening Friday 7 June at 6pm

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VIEW CATALOGUE

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Familiars and Apparitions

                                         First witch:

                                    I come, Graymalkin.

                                        Second witch:

                                    Paddockcalls.

                                                                        –Macbeth*

Only a few hundred years back, the image of the witch, naked, dancing, flying, conjuring was familiar to people throughout Europe. The image, if we consult the woodcuts from the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries*, were incomplete without the presence of small creatures, a familiar: a dog, more often a cat, rat, frog or toad.

In any case, a living creature believed to be imbued with power, or somehow mysteriously connected, to the powers of the spirit world. These beings served as guides for the magical journeys of their mistresses and masters. For the Christian zealots of the time, familiars were signs of diabolic influence, of refusal of monotheistic power, of a preference for the natural world over the blunt-edged puritanism of the Church. Over the course of centuries, cowled zealots tortured, burned or drowned tens of thousands of witches, mainly women and girls. The various Satanic panics were useful political ploys, helping the ruling classes of those times to redirect the rage of a brutalised peasantry away from themselves onto other, easier targets. Such methods are still effective in our time. Along with the human victims of demented patriarchal fundamentalism were the small creatures, the faithful beasts and pets who shared their masters' lives and suffering.

The kinds of persecution mania evident under monotheistic Christianity of the time did not seem to exist in traditional and Indigenous cultures. For them, the witch was more often a figure of respect, a community leader, a therapist for body and mind.

So what does this have to do with the art in front of you? To begin with, consider the dynamics of modern history; a time where rusted-on certainties are being called to account like never before: sexism, racism, colonialism and cruelty to both humans and animals. If the panic of the ruling classes of our era is anything to go by – and their media commentariat who seem especially agitated by 'wokeness' – change is, as in witch-burning times, denounced as the greatest possible threat to civilisation. But could it be, and consider the possibility, that not only are these same denizens of talk-back radio and social media chat groups wrong –  horror of horrors! – what if the challenges of wokeness were not just wrong but actually correct? Could it be that the radically challenging and reinterpretations of history ('His story' because it’s not mine,' as the poet and musician, Gil Scott-Heron has said) provide a better insight than an old discredited certainties? Could it be that the witches were not, as the propaganda of the era had it, enemies of society but its guiding lights, its healers, counsellors, apothecaries, natural scientists, midwives, custodians and archivists of rich traditions of folk knowledge, its shahmans – mediators between the human and natural worlds upon which life depends?

What do we make of the misguided legacy, the historical narrative of the victors in the long 'culture wars' of history who demonised(!) any who did not, could not, would not comply with their death-fixated institutions? How fearful were they that witch and familiar - those original outsiders and visionaries - might infect the body politic with non-conformist and radical ideas when all real knowledge was explicitly banned?

Our exhibition is a tribute to the witches' familiars, the loving pets, inspirational sprites, anthropomorphic entities who acted as guides, comforters and companions to their marginalised and persecuted mistresses.

They remind us of our inner landscapes, pointing toward knowledge of the real, the uncomfortable facts of nature's supremacy, the limits of technocracy and its ability to monitor and control every corner of society. They remind us emphatically of humanities' part in nature. Note the wording: in nature, not dominating it, not controlling it, not even as 'custodians' of it. Familiars point us, like the mysterious animal friends and tricksters of fairytale and myth, toward authentic and possible selves, beings dangerous to the anthropocentric-capitalist-patriarchy which are only glimpsed in the distance as a phantom or apparition, a projection of our desire, haunting us with the possibility of a better world like Marx's 'phantom haunting Europe', or Luis Bunuel's Phantom of Liberty. Why not both?

Familiars & Apparitions is an invitation to stop, listen, and in this case, look to the images of our inner beastiary for a clearer perspective, a much needed deeper vision.

Written by Tim White, 2024.

*According to Jamie Doward in ‘Why Europe’s wars of religion put 40,000 ‘witches’ to a  terrible death’ (The Guardian,13th January, 2018) the numbers may have been as many or more than 80,000 people.