Emily Hesse’s (b.Middlesbrough, 1980) interdisciplinary, often collaborative practice includes the use of performance, drawing, writing, film, photography sculpture and installation to question and aggravate social and political power dynamics through psychogeography, philosophy, regional folk histories, collective action and the use of land and its associated materials as a physical form of protest. Deeply rooted in social structures and the landscape itself, Hesse’s work is born of the space she occupies and utilises aesthetics as a tool for subversion. Hesse takes her own land, marginalised narratives, personal items from her home and family life, the often ugly and unfamiliar materials of historical significance and draws out their political and social mythologies, highlighting unknown content and transforming them into encounters/objects or sites of collective familiarity.

The narration accompanying this film is taken from Bertram Frank’s Notes on Witchcraft, (1966) and is used with the kind permission of Ryedale Folk Museum.

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