Dream Walking - the witch's ladder and Pegasus

Continuing the explanation behind the clues from our Dream Walk in Nottingham.

Clue: It was believed that witches cast a death spell over a person by tying the knots and then hiding the cord, and the only way to undo the spell was to find the secreted cord and untie each knot.

Hanging from a tree at the top of Bottle Lane we hung a number of feathers tied to a string.

This was inspired by The Witches Ladder, an art work by Klaus Weber that we had seen at Nottingham Contemporary, where he tied feathers to a rope.  When we looked into the idea of witches' ladders, we discovered the magic behind it of tying knots in string.  The feathers linked the idea to our theme of flying.

Clue:  Where travelling horses rest.

The image of Pegasus, the flying horse, was inspired by something that Managing Director David Glazebrook of CPMG Architects told us.  We had asked Mr Glazebrook if we could put one of our images behind the gate where they were storing their bins by their offices in Warser Gate, because it was a really dark space that could be seen from the street and would work really well with the reflective material that we made all the images from.  He said that that area would originally have been where horse drawn carriages would go in and out to transport the lace manufactured here, the original use for the buildings that CPMG now use.  So we felt we should have a horse image, but linking with our theme of flying it became Pegasus, the flying horse!

Photo by Matt Vaughan

To see pictures of our works glowing in the dark at Light Night, click here.