Over the next few months, Alicia Matthews will be an artist in residence with Rig Arts, working with communities in Greenock, including caregivers and mother-and-child groups, to explore the history of the Inverclyde witch trials through creative workshops, walking tours and programming. Using this miscarriage of justice as a lens, the project will consider contemporary experiences of womanhood, extending to maternal mental health, ageing and women’s unpaid labour.
Alongside this history, she is interested in the enduring cultural archetypes of “the witch” – symbol of both female repression and liberation. From the systemic persecution of everyday women to the witch as a figure of female power, autonomy and the unknown, she will explore where these realities and representations meet and ask whether the archetype might offer a means of remembering and giving voice to those who lost theirs.
The programme will include ceramic workshops, walking tour of sites connected to the trials, foraging, film screenings and talks exploring folklore and the continuing relevance of the witch trials. She hopes to culminate the residency with a procession involving participants, alongside an exhibition of the work made together as part of the Galoshans Festival.
Alicia Matthews
b.1988, Greenock
Alicia Matthews is an artist and audio maker living and working in the Outer Hebrides. Past projects have used moving image, performance, sculpture and sound to explore the body as matter, technological hauntings, societal glitches, common land, geology and deep time – often as speculative fictions. Recent work uses text, drawing and ceramics to investigate the maternal body, witches, The Gaelic Otherworld and relationships between rusting industrial detritus and the blanketing bog.
Previous work has been exhibited and performed across the UK – including at Glasgow Tramway, Camden Arts Centre, Tate Modern and Tate Britain – as well as internationally at galleries and festivals in Lublin, Venice, Guangzhou and New York.
Past compositions have been commissioned by platforms including Jerwood Resonance and Radiophrenia.
Musical projects include Malaizy (Few Crackles), SUE ZUKI (Domestic Exile), LAPS (DFA records, MIC records) and Organs of Love (Optimo Music). Alicia co-runs the independent record label Domestic Exile and hosts a long-standing monthly show on NTS radio.
In 2025 Alicia & Robbie Thomson founded HAAR Projects, an arts organisation that focuses on the production of visual and sonic art projects that engage communities across the Western Isles and beyond. Recent collaborators include the Calanais Standing Stones Trust and Radiophrenia
A Rig Arts/ Galoshans Artist Resident 2026
SB – Sound Based
T: Transcript
V: Highly Visual / No or Little Text
R: Relaxed Performance
Old West Kirk, Greenock, PA16 8AN
On street parking around the venue
Yes. The event takes place at ground level and is largely step-free. Accessible routes are available throughout the event site.
