Step into The Witches’ Room

A bit more than a year ago — it feels like a lifetime now — I published a colouring book called We Are the Witches. A total labour of love, drawn page after page, by hand.

Then I got big ideas!

I decided to turn the book into a walk-in installation. I wanted women to be able to enter the pages — to cover the walls from floor to ceiling with black-and-white witches, ready to be brought to life with colour.

The project was created for the FiLiA 2025 conference, where I wanted to offer something different: a gentle creative space in the middle of a demanding, emotionally intense event. A room to slow down, breathe, doodle, stretch out on a sofa, reconnect with the right hemisphere of the brain, and just… be.

So the work began — finding a room, resizing and redesigning every drawing to fit the walls, tell a story, inspire, and connect women to our Herstory.

At the heart of the project, the long-buried memory of the witches: women killed in their millions through a church – and state-driven campaign of terror that still goes largely unspoken. These were the spinsters and the rebels, the midwives pushed out by the rise of patriarchal medicine, the women who refused to obey a male god, the Beguines who dared to live without men and were hated for it. This room says: we remember. It becomes a shared space of remembering and resistance, where women don’t just look — they take part. As the walls fill with colour, the witches return not as myth or superstition, but as real ancestors of defiance. Alive in ink. Alive in our hands. Alive in us.

In practical terms, it also meant figuring out how to attach art to brick without drilling, damaging, or collapsing the whole thing onto someone’s head.

Cue months of problem-solving, research, and many “how on earth am I going to do this?” moments. The solution (thank you, Michelle!) came in the form of hundreds of hand-cut grey boards, light enough to hang and fixed with temporary adhesive.

Blessed Be!

Then came the wallpaper itself. Zero budget, of course. No glossy large-scale printing for me. The longest wall was seven metres long — wildly out of my means. So I went fully old school.

Every drawing was chopped and printed on A3 paper, then assembled by hand into enormous panels, like an monstrous puzzle. My living-room floor disappeared for months under paper witches.

One sheet at a time, one panel at a time, one wall at a time, the project took shape. Between regular shop orders, a book project in the pipeline, a workshop and a stall to organise — those pre-FiLiA months were relentless.

Installation day arrived. After setting up my stall, Louise — the wonderful FiLiA volunteer assigned to help me (thank you so much!) — and I spent the day fixing every single grey board to the wall. Helpers popped in and out (thank you Rachel Ara, Trish and Mara). By late afternoon, we began installing the wallpaper itself, exhausted, dusty, racing the clock.

I came back early on the very first morning of the conference to finalise it all. When the last panel finally went up, the room shifted. It turned into a real-life walk-in colouring book. Witches alive on the walls, waiting for women’s hands. After months of solitary labour, it was suddenly real. A space made for women, by women. I stood there quietly for a (very short) moment before the doors opened, breathing it in.

And then you all came.

The room was used exactly as I had hoped: women sprawled on sofas, colouring on the walls, talking, laughing, resting, processing, reconnecting. A gentle, creative pause inside an intense political weekend. Right-brain energy in full flow. It worked.

At the end of the conference, completely spontaneously, I asked the women in the room if they would help me take the installation down.

What followed was one of the most powerful moments of the whole project.

The dismantling became a collective, cathartic act. Panels were peeled from the walls. Hands touching the surface one last time. Joy, rage, release. There was never any option to keep this art piece. It was always designed to be ephemeral. So Sunday evening meant destruction. But women were invited to cut out and take home any fragment of the work they wanted — pieces of witches travelling off into the world, I imagine them now being stuck onto women’s kitchen walls, bedrooms, studios, across countries and continents.

The installation didn’t just end.

It lives on.

My deepest gratitude to FiLiA for the opportunity and support during the building of this project, most particularly to Michelle Kerwin, Lisa Marie Tailor, Rachel Ara and Louise, without whom this work would not have been possible!

Additional Thanks to photographer Pauline Makoveitchoux, who immortalised this piece. Many of the pictures on this post are hers xx