About this Event
The Portico Library is delighted to announce a new exhibition, Witches and Healers, which draws on Rosie Reed Hillman’s groundbreaking project Something That Was Ours, which explores what it means to be a witch today. The work addresses feminist themes of wellbeing, aging and place in relation to magic, ritual, and healing. Reed Hillman’s portraits of witches and healers are curated in dialogue with historic texts chosen by critical friends, who identify with the practice of witchcraft and / or healing. The portraits, the books chosen and their interpretation, confront the journey women have come on to embrace and reclaim these identities.
This exhibition offers a unique and unparalleled insight to the diverse lives and stories of women who live as witches and healers. Using a mix of moving image and photography the artwork builds a sensory and emotive portrait of women in midlife. Covering themes of menopause, mental health, outsider identities, and women’s sisterhood this work explores the ways women imagine a better world through ritual and magic as well as drawing on it as a source of solace and healing.
Historic books have chosen for display by Rosemary Wood, Becca Smith, Alice Measom McMahon, and Polly Anna Rosa Steiner address environmental connections and the use of plants in healing by witches and healers as well as local representation of witches in the Northwest of England and use in colonial stereotyping. Books on display include J. G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough, William Harrison Ainsworth’s The Pendle Witches, and Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea.
Welcome & Speeches 6pm.
Hard and soft drinks by donation.
Event venue & nearby stays
The Portico Library, 57 Mosley Street, Manchester, United Kingdom
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups — all the happenings, one place.