In this new series Fraleigh draws parallels between art production and spellcraft, harnessing the magic of making the invisible, visible. Ecstatic Maenads gather amongst a frenzied tangle of medicinal herbs and serpents to raucously summon the powers of mythical female figures such as: Artemis, Hecate and Medusa to aid in casting a spell.
The work is part archaeological romp through representation, featuring goddesses in both their celebrated and reviled forms; and part reclamation, as it shifts the lens to reveal a more complex, diverse history. They are layered with magical signifiers and enchanted materials like crystals, moon water, and color magic. Each work is blessed and accompanied by a custom spell for Self-Sovereignty written by professional witch, Pam Grossman.
The maenad serves as a symbolic abandonment of the confining roles and identities of femininity and as an embrace of the pleasure seeking erratic, rebellious, unconcerned-with-popular-opinion kind of figure. In ancient sources, their transcendence gives them unparalleled strength and courage as well as a disregard for earthly consequences. Followers of Dionysus, referred to as the “The Raving Ones”, were feared because of their wildness, and they became a considerable source of fright for those who would seek to contain them.
Each painting serves as a kind of spell — one that disrupts, re-imagines, and re-signifies the female characters from familiar tales so as to challenge our perceptions of the past and experience a different future.
The links between the “witch” and systemic power structures such as capitalism, organized religion, and the patriarchy are profound and painfully relevant today as it relates to female power, bodily autonomy, and persecution. In her ground-breaking book Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici makes the important claim that the medieval witch-hunt across Europe was a necessary precondition for the emergence of flourishing capitalism. Women’s speech, movement, and social relationships were tightly controlled with the help of witch hunts and accusations of witchcraft on poor, peasant women, were in part an effort to dispossess them of the land they lived on. The witch-hunt was about controlling women’s bodies to repopulate a workforce for the wealthy.
In this moment of violent, institutional attack on bodily autonomy, the maenad responds with wild, joyful, reckless love and fierce, frenzied, protective anger–summoning the power to upend damaging societal structures.