Hag Exhibition Review

How would it feel to be called a hag, a crone, or a witch? In a society that prizes youth – especially for women – instinct says it’s an insult. Like most, I’ve been raised on a toxic diet of explicit and insidious messages about the supposed limits of our (re)productive power, and by extension, our creativity. Lately, the looming pressure to “make it” before my body changes has felt impossible to ignore. But what if we were to collectively reframe ageing and understand it as a process of creative, bodily and mental transformation?  

A traditionally offensive term, ‘hag’ is rooted in witchcraft. It originates from Middle English, a shortening of ‘haegtesse’, meaning ‘witch, sorceress, enchantress or fury’. Historically, those accused of being witches lived outside societal expectations and risked their lives to stay true to their individuality. To title an exhibition ‘Hag’, then, promises provocation. By owning and reclaiming the word, this group exhibition curated by Kate Pickering and programmed by Fife Contemporary challenges the cultural devaluation of ageing, celebrating instead the wisdom that comes with experience.  
 

Image: Kate Pickering / Photography by Lydia Smith, courtesy of Fife Contemporary

‘Call me a hag, I dare you!’, the challenge blazes from the gallery wall. We are invited to consider hag as a ‘beacon of strength, community, and the transformative power of craft for all’. Empowered by the interpretative text, I move through the space to investigate the fruits of years upon years of creative endeavour. 13 Scotland-based makers – all over 50 – are represented here, their disciplines spanning basketry to tapestry, metalwork to pottery. From the outset, it’s refreshing to see the organisers spotlight makers with decades of experience in their chosen craft. Exhibition opportunities for emerging (read: young) artists are often plentiful – or at least more visible – while those with long-established practices are too easily overlooked. 
 

Image: Lise Bech / Photography by Lydia Smith, courtesy of Fife Contemporary

In the first room, I’m drawn to basketmaker and willow grower Lise Bech’s sculptural forms. Only sharing a likeness with their source material of organic homegrown hand-harvested willow, Seven Sisters range from voluptuous to slender, as if a coven comprised of unlikely strangers. In the tallest basket, a hag stone rests at the bottom, a symbol of protection and spirituality. The others, with a closer weave, appear to hold secrets and brim with potential.  
 

Image: Patricia Shone / Photography by Lydia Smith, courtesy of Fife Contemporary

Nearby are Patricia Shone’s cauldron-like vessels that embrace imperfection. Sculpted from raw clay, their scorched surfaces show the drama of firing, bearing enigmatic fractures that suggest the traces of ancient potions brewed within. Seven pots, shaped by distinct methods – including the Japanese methods of Raku firing and kintsugi – demonstrate a fierce technical command. Kintsugi, in particular, aligns with Hag's curatorial vision; this is the practice of repairing an object without concealing its supposed flaws, but instead emphasising its history. This is somewhat of a radical act given the capitalist inclination to discard objects, and subjects, once they are deemed unusable. Resembling the delicate texture of skin, the pots’ beauty lies in their irregularities, not their smoothness.  
 

Image: Gilly Langton / Photography by Lydia Smith, courtesy of Fife Contemporary

The works of jewellery designer Gilly Langton and designer Claire Heminsley thread a connection between the first and second rooms. To embrace the identity of ‘hag’ is to also exhibit defiance through what we choose to wear. Langton’s larger-than-life jewellery shares a likeness with the vastness and mystery of the Highland coast. In particular, one turquoise and ultramarine necklace evokes a fishing net, as if poised to catch selkies from the Scottish sea.
 

Image: Claire Heminsley / Photography by Lydia Smith, courtesy of Fife Contemporary

Meanwhile, in Rebellious Aprons, Heminsley reclaims a traditional symbol of domesticity as her canvas for feminist ends. She draws on the 1981 Greenock uprising, when working-class women successfully took control of the Lee Jeans factory in the face of threatened closure and mass unemployment. In response, her paper apron designs refuse compliance, with one emblazoned with the phrase ‘take no shit.’ Another maps an imaginary hag community, its winding roads marked with an icon that comically reads ‘Hags on tour’. Here, Heminsley dreams up a revolutionary lexicon that honours old age, citing intuition, effervescence and tenacity as defining hag characteristics.  

The impulse to touch in a craft exhibition is inevitable and to resist takes great willpower. This tactility is perhaps epitomised by Amanda J Simmons’s Crow Portals that appear like an intoxicating optical illusion. Through layered textures and black glass powders fused in a kiln, Simmons summons the iridescent feathers of a crow: the witch’s accomplice, often cast as a harbinger of death. While she found inspiration in Ted Hughes’s poetry, tapestry artist Jo McDonald transforms second-hand books into woven sculptures that twist and converge, forming an unearthly creature in Reconnections (2021). The words on the page are no longer decipherable, their original meanings distorted to construct a new narrative. Once again, environmental concerns are present here, as McDonald has opted to recycle unwanted material.  
 

Image: Jo McDonald / Photography by Lydia Smith, courtesy of Fife Contemporary