The Old Wife

Location

Country: UK
City: London
Place: Downing Street

The Old Wife is a digital photograph originally presented in Emily Hesse: The Witches Institution (W.I.), The Tetley, Leeds, in 2022. Hesse was obsessed with recording and communicating with the standing stones and circles of the North York Moors, where she grew up and her ancestors had lived for hundreds of years. She specifically documented a history entangled in the folklore of witchcraft. She would often dress the stone circles in fabrics and made a film about these performances, Kissing the Bees, first shown at BALTIC 39 in 2019, commissioned by BALTIC Professor Andrea Phillips.
The Old Wife on Ainthorpe Rigg was a stone she returned to time after time. Part of the folklore of the moors was that witches had often been petrified into stone and that their spirits were enclosed within the rock. Hesse whispered to the stones, embraced them and wrapped them in beautiful fabrics. In 2019, she was married at the Old Wife stone, and it became a central part of her understanding of arts practice, weather and moorland folklore in the context of new imaginings of Englishness.The photograph is of a large sandstone within a burial mound from which an original medieval trackway has been diverted – a trackway known as The Old Wives Way. The stone is dressed in fabric taken from Hesse’s bedroom and tied with string to beautify and caress the stone and show its resplendent female beauty.
Text: Dr Martyn Hudson, Northumbria University, UK

Emily Hesse lived and worked in Middlesbrough, UK. She was longlisted for the Paul Hamlyn Award for Visual Arts in 2013, shortlisted for the 2020 Arts Foundation Futures Awards for Visual Artists, and in 2021 was the recipient of The Tetley Jerwood Commission. At the time of her death in November 2022, she was engaged in PhD research at the Belfast School of Art, Ulster University.

Places

North York Moors

Subjects

fantasy & folklore, witch

Materials & Techniques

Artist

Emily Hesse (27 April 1980 - 4 November 2022)

Title

The Old Wife

Date

2022

Medium

digital photograph

Dimensions

height: cm width: cm depth: cm

Acquisition

Purchased from Dr Martyn Hudson, May 2024, through the Art XUK project 2023-24

GAC number

19330