The Sorceress of Aeaea

The Sorceress of Aeaea brings Circe into an intimate portrait after a series of works exploring transformation through body, shadow, reflection and landscape. The question beneath those works was never simply what Circe had done to others, but what repeated acts of transformation might have done to her. Here, consequence has moved close to the skin. An ordinary agricultural ear tag, an instrument of identification, ownership and control, reverses the hierarchy: the classifier has become classified; the woman who made the herd now bears its mark. Yet her unwavering gaze refuses either victimhood or absolution. She remains sovereign and captive, human and animal, monster and maker at once.

Within the Sourceress world, clothing behaves as archive rather than decoration, carrying lineage, encoded knowledge and inherited memory close to the body. The embroidered pigs circling Circe’s throat become both frieze and record. From one animal’s foot, a loose red thread descends into milky water and begins to diffuse, shifting almost imperceptibly from textile into something biological, part lineage, part wound, part spell still unravelling. The water receives it but does not cleanse it. Circe remains entangled with what she has made. The line between making monsters and becoming one always leaves a mark.