This ongoing collaboration with artist and broomsquire Cate O’Connell Richards explores ideas of illegibility, power, and feminized labor during the Salem witch trials, using an instrument of domestic labor and flight (the broom) and the words young girls used to accuse their older, mostly female, neighbors of witchcraft. The girls’ words take the form of the cross-stitched sampler, which these young accusers would have been learning how to sew at the time of the trials. (I, too, learned to cross-stitch at their age). As young girls learn to sew, so they learn to accuse.
Brooms and broom hoods by Cate O’Connell Richards, textile poems by me.
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