Abstract
This chapter explores the interconnectedness between stories, place and creator and the ways that knowing, walking and feeling a place is so vital to engaging with content. Experience of place inevitably leaves gaps as not everything can be seen and touched and smelled and felt, thereby creating spaces for imaginative engagement. The stories and histories of place are also fragmentary, what remains are often spectral traces of the past in the present. Equally, comics as a medium is built on gaps and elisions, and often manifests on the page as empty space, but one rich with creative potential. The chapter centralises PhD research that connects these gaps by creating papercut comics that tell stories of witch folklore that is deeply connected to specific places, using walking as a creative method.
The chapter looks at the first of these papercut stories, one about a Cornish woman called Joan Wytte whose reputation as a witch has posthumously grown with the stories that have developed around her, and who supposedly died in Bodmin Jail in 1813, but was not buried until 1998, after her remains had been exhibited at the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Boscastle. Her literal envelopment in the land has furthered what Cornish (2020) refers to as ‘the inspirited landscape’ around Boscastle, and the short walk from the museum to her gravestone has become a pilgrimage for visiting witches and Pagans to pay their respects. As Solnit notes, a path can allow one to connect to the stories that are soaked within in, ‘a form of spatial theatre’ (2014: 68).
The story emerged from a connection with the landscapes that house them, in turn facilitating a re-imagining of the lore of the land rendered as papercut. Papercut is a technique that utilises both what remains and what is taken away to form the image. The use of silhouette is particularly important as these, like many representations of witches themselves as well as the landscapes that surround them, are recognisable as contour, but the detail remains hidden.
The chapter looks at the first of these papercut stories, one about a Cornish woman called Joan Wytte whose reputation as a witch has posthumously grown with the stories that have developed around her, and who supposedly died in Bodmin Jail in 1813, but was not buried until 1998, after her remains had been exhibited at the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Boscastle. Her literal envelopment in the land has furthered what Cornish (2020) refers to as ‘the inspirited landscape’ around Boscastle, and the short walk from the museum to her gravestone has become a pilgrimage for visiting witches and Pagans to pay their respects. As Solnit notes, a path can allow one to connect to the stories that are soaked within in, ‘a form of spatial theatre’ (2014: 68).
The story emerged from a connection with the landscapes that house them, in turn facilitating a re-imagining of the lore of the land rendered as papercut. Papercut is a technique that utilises both what remains and what is taken away to form the image. The use of silhouette is particularly important as these, like many representations of witches themselves as well as the landscapes that surround them, are recognisable as contour, but the detail remains hidden.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Writing Landscape and Setting in the Anthropocene |
| Subtitle of host publication | Britain and beyond |
| Editors | Craig Jordan-Baker, Philippa Holloway |
| Publisher | Palgrave Macmillan |
| Chapter | 3 |
| Pages | 71-89 |
| Edition | 1 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 9783031499555 |
| ISBN (Print) | 9783031499579 |
| Publication status | Published - 31 May 2024 |