Sarah Sharp
Burn Witch Burn on custom wallpaper titled Women Looking/Revolution Repeat and Women Looking/Revolution Diamond, 2021
Custom cotton fabric, linen, wood
6 modular 40" x 30" triangles
Burn Witch Burn combines various custom fabrics based on text and images from 1970's feminist publications and my own landscape photos. The essay Burn Witch Burn, published in "Woman: A Journal of Liberation," (Baltimore MD, 1972), discusses “witches” throughout history as women healers whose empirical approach to medicine threatened religious patriarchal power structures. The modular triangle components can be recombined into numerous shapes, referencing non-hierarchical, flexible systems. It's part of the series Doing it for Ourselves, which explores themes found in underground feminist press from the early 1970's that still resonate 50 years later. These publications were places where feminists learned, discussed and argued about issues that we are still reckoning with today: racism and homophobia in society and within "the movement," pay and healthcare inequity, inclusive history, domestic violence, environmentalism, and war.
- Sarah Sharp