Presenter: Meaghan Forbis
Mentor: Julie Voelker-Morris
Poster: 16
Major: Political Science
Ray Bradbury said that “a witch is born out of the true hungers of her time.” Witches and witchcraft have occupied a dynamic place within our culture for centuries, representing all facets of the feminine identity. Mother, warrior,
virgin, crone; witches can be all of these things. Female power as interpreted through witchcraft takes on an alien nature, removing it further from pressures of patriarchy. Starting from two points, Lilith, the Judeo-Christian Mother of Demons, and the Morrigan, the Celtic goddess of war, this multimedia collage experience explores the different ways in which witchcraft is represented in art and modern culture. The collage will include music, couture photography, reproductions of various traditional art works, excerpts from novels and poetry, and an interactive “altar.” The “altar,” presented on a small table, will include elements of pop culture witchcraft along side a variety of other objects, as a mean to convey the interconnectedness of modern womanhood and the traditional witch archetype. As female power has been demystified and trivialized through such things as modernity’s war on women and the “Grrl power” movement, monster girl culture has redeveloped. Witchcraft represents a place in which women can exist without needing to bow down to outside pressure, in which we can stride out into the night knowing that we are the most fearful thing in it, in which, as Joseph Campbell says, “all the gods, all the heavens, all the hells, are within you.”
*Title from Shakespeare’s Henry V.