Why the Crone?

It could be because I and my friends are becoming, or already are, old women.

Except that the Crone series isn’t about individual women, it is about culture. Specifically it is about deep culture and what feeds our souls.

The Crone with her many manifestations, is missing from ours. She has been slowly reduced and pushed into the shadows over thousands of years.  We have been left with few depictions of old women, mostly the benign grandmother and the evil witch. Between these images, an entire spectrum of power has been erased.

What does it mean when a society exiles its most ancient female archetypes? What is lost when age is stripped of authority and wisdom is severed from a culture?

Our wider culture is immature. It has the values and wisdom of an unstable teenager. This is why we are conditioned to value youth, physical beauty, social status and stuff. It is also why we fear aging, wisdom and depth. There is nothing wrong with youth, beauty, social status or luxury. But when a culture stops maturing at such an early point, it then tells us that these qualities are what will bring happiness and fulfilment. This not only leads individuals into deep misery, it is dangerous to ourselves and the wider world. Which we are experiencing.

What is needed? Maturity. We need true adults and elders. Healthy children and adolescents are also important. Children need mature, wise adults and elders in order to mature emotionally and spiritually.

Hence, let’s not infantilise old women as harmless grandmothers, or fear their power and wisdom by making them into evil witches.

As for the word crone, it has been bent into a slur over centuries of cultural distortion. I return to it deliberately, restoring its original gravity and force.

The Crone is not merely an old woman. The figures that enter my drawings carry deep time within them. They are presences resurfacing from a lineage that has endured for tens of thousands of years. The Crone embodies endings that are also beginnings. She is a destroyer in the service of transformation and renewal. She holds death in one hand and rebirth in the other.

In this series, I follow her trail backward through time. Before written language. Before empire. Beyond scripture. I find her etched into bone and stone, carried in myth and ritual, present more than 30,000 years ago. She appears as elder, oracle, guardian, destroyer, creator, god herself. These archetypes existed long before patriarchal religions began to revise their stories and diminish their power. She is not peripheral. She is foundational.

Through the Crone series, I hope to restore visibility to what has long been obscured, and to reassert the power of the ancient feminine as a venerated and vital force in our cultural imagination.

I am not inventing these images. I am re-membering them.