Read the Heads
My bloodline flows from Sicily, both sides of my family are Sicilian, all of them. Stregheria is the term used for witchcraft in Italy. My mother has always said that she is a witch, and I have always believed her. Many times a child I would find piles of salt outside of doors and windows, I was told that was the remains of evil trying to enter the house. To this day I’m not sure if that was my mom’s ploy to keep us kids from reeking havoc in the house or if it was evil actually being stopped form entering the house. Either way I still have a propensity to believe that it was evil being stopped. Over the years my sense that witch’s blood flows through my veins has become more and more vivid.
Fava beans are said to carry a great deal of luck and were used much like tea leaves, bones, or dust for reading the future path of an inquiring person. Fava beans have a very distinct look light reddish-brown in color with a very dark brown small line at one end.
Heads are all over the place in Sicily. The most prominent is on the Sicilian flag. The head of Medusa sits in the center of the flag, an amulet guarding from bad luck symbolizing a mistrust of fate. The whole symbol referred to as a Trinacria, was often used to ward off evil from homes usually placed behind doors so the evil would turn to stone before entering.
The other head found with ease in Sicily is the Moorish Head, usually made of ceramic and extravagantly decorated. The lore behind these heads varies but generally follows a tail similar to this excerpt from Times of Sicily:
The original folk tale behind the ceramic heads comes from Palermo and tells of a Saracen merchant who falls in love with a beautiful local girl. Together they start a passionate love affair, until the girl discovers her lover has a wife and children waiting for him in his homeland. In a fit of jealously and rage she murders him in his sleep, cutting off his head, so that her lover would stay with her forever. The girl uses the head as a vase to grow a beautiful basil plant. Others seeing her flourishing plant, forge themselves the colourful clay head pots in an attempt to recreate the bountiful fertility.
Full text here https://www.timesofsicily.com/truth-behind-sicilian-ceramic-moorish-heads/
So when it came time to create an artwork while using a a divination practice I took the ideas from Sicilian heritage and my obsession with action figures and combined them to create a new divination practice that ultimately became the artwork itself. A series of 13 photos were taken of 14 heads. Each toss of the heads yields a different random pattern form the heads. I then layered these photos and applied a variety of transformations to achieve a series of gifs. Here are the original 13 photos without any editing.
