Photo: Ann Shelton
Ann Shelton Photo: Bonnie Beattie
The front of artist Ann Shelton’s award-winning new book worm, root, wort… & bane bears an image of a small silvered glass flask held in the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford University.
The flask is said to contain a witch. The original owner reputedly warned that if you took off the wax seal from the flask, then there would be a “peck o’trouble”.
Shelton’s artist book doesn’t directly advocate for the seal to be broken, but does suggest it’s high time we let a bigger ‘genie’ out of the bottle. That is, the historical and contemporary treatment of healers, gardeners, foragers and ‘wise women’ who have connected us to nature.
Worm, root, wort… & bane takes a wide-ranging look at cultural attitudes towards the witch, plants as well as the suppression of plant-based medicine and belief systems.
Photo: Ann Shelton
This busy, compact scrapbook of Shelton’s research, which was designed by Duncan Munro and recently won a Best Design Award, contains a multitude of photographs, paintings, commissioned essays, the artist’s works and quotes from down through the ages.
It collects, in colour-coded sections, a multitude of historical illustrations of the different uses, stories and meaning of Western plants - from the Angel’s Trumpet or Datura, to mugwort. It also has sections devoted to the cultural treatment and accoutrements of the witch - from the cauldron to the birch broom. This includes recent popular culture: for example, the subversion of ‘60s TV show Bewitched and the witches of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials.
Photo: Ann Shelton
Shelton describes it succinctly as “a book that reassembles fragments of old knowledge to restore our relationship with plants”.
It’s also about the denial of women’s sovereignty over their own bodies and recognition of their wisdom. This denial has seen midwives branded as witches and the suppression of rights like abortion.
“Systems of belief concerning the medicinal, magical and spiritual uses of plant materials were well established in the lives of European forest, nomadic and ancient peoples,” writes Shelton.
“However, these beliefs were forcibly supplanted as pagan practices were displaced across Europe and other continents in the wake of Christianity and the rise of capitalism.
“The consequences of the suppression and attempted erasure of this plant-based belief system continue to be profound.”
Photo: Ann Shelton
Worm, root, wort… & bane has been published by Alice Austen House in New York.
Alice Austen, who features in this book, was a Staten Island New York photographer, gardener and seed and cuttings collector at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Austen stepped outside of societal expectations in the photographs she took and the female company she kept. Organising garden and bicycle clubs, she has become now a queer icon.
For Ann Shelton this work is also a way to connect with her Scottish, Irish, English, Italian and European heritage. It brings together her experience as a celebrated artist, photojournalist, and as a gardener and forager.
Worm, root, wort... & bane builds on and showcases 19 artworks from Shelton’s series i am an old phenomenon, which has been shown in New York and several locations in Aotearoa. This consists of a series of photographs of plant sculptures constructed by the artist.
Photo: Ann Shelton
It also presents artworks derived from Shelton submerging the plants she has researched in water, evoking both the making of tinctures and ointments and the submersion of witches and their knowledge.
Photo: Ann Shelton
worm, root, wort... & bane is available as a limited edition from www.annshelton.com and Rim Books.
Photo: Ann Shelton
