swan skin

This crankie scroll is a story inspired by fact, fiction and feathers…..

Part of my Artweeks exhibition 2025 was ‘Swan Skin’.

I did demonstrations and discussed the project and the making of the scroll and allowed people to come and play with the box and puppets. I also performed the story at the evening private view.

This scroll was handmade using vintage canary parchment, paper doilies, lace trim, black sugar paper, black carbon paper, mulberry papers and tissue papers. Puppets are black card stock, coloured/clear acetate. Music/soundscape made by myself.

The Saveock Water pits and an ecology of magic exist down in Cornwall. After hearing about an archeological dig, which dug up far more that anyone anticipated, in this small Cornish nook of countryside, I couldn’t get the findings out of my head...... Evidence of pagan rituals involving swans and other birds in in the 17th century were uncovered by archaeologists.

Since 2003, 35 pits at the site in a valley near Truro have been excavated containing swan pelts, dead magpies, unhatched eggs, quartz pebbles, human hair, fingernails and part of an iron cauldron.

The finds have been dated to the 1640s, a period of turmoil in England when Cromwellian Puritans destroyed any links to pre-Christian pagan England. It was also a period when witchcraft attracted the death sentence.

Human occupation of the site dates to prehistoric times but some of the activity uncovered was more recent. A stone-lined spring that may have been a “holy well” was full of offerings from the 17th century, including 125 strips of cloth from dresses, cherry stones and nail clippings.

There was evidence that the well had been filled and the site destroyed to hide what went on there.

Gallery, scroll stills and performance snaps

Each of the feather pits, which are about 40cm square by 17cm deep, have been carefully lined with the intact pelt of one swan and contain other bird remains. The pits where the contents were intact also contained a leaf parcel holding stones that experts have traced to Swanpool beach, 15 miles away, an area famed for its swan population. Killing a swan would have been incredibly risky at this time because they are the property of the Crown.

Swan feathers had a connection with fertility. It’s possible these offerings were being left. Then, if there was a conception, nine months later the person would return to empty the pit.

But have these rituals truly been abandoned?. Twine was discovered in one pit which dated it as recently as the 1970s.....so perhaps the secret continues.

So with all this madness in mind, I began to spin a tale about secret rituals and knowledge passed down from mother to daughter as a witchy coming of age anecdote, sprinkling in some transformative water magic for good measure.

A little bit of demo footage from the exhibition