Polly White - ‘As Dusk Crawls’
Titled ‘As Dusk Crawls’, this ongoing series explores the witch trials of the 17th century in Wales, or lack of. In comparison to the rest of Europe at the time (and some parts of America), Wales had no ‘witch hunt’ and mass executions, and I wanted to explore this unique phenomenon within these images.
Influenced by the guilty verdicts of eight Welsh witches (only one sentenced to death), I attempt to challenge Arcadian ideals of landscape to create a discourse between the beauty of nature but also the darker undertones of folklore.
I wanted to capture this sense of the paradoxical, to build a narrative weaving the allure of the pastoral but also introducing a foreboding sense of ‘other’ in the environment.
