Impact case study database

The Exhibition : Spellbound was opened by Philip Pullman on 31 August 2018 and ran for four months to 6 January 2019. Created with Professor Marina Wallace, from the Artakt consultancy, and [*redacted text*] from architects Stanton Williams ( 5.6), it displayed 194 objects, images, manuscripts, and books from 48 institutional and private lenders: more than for any previous Ashmolean exhibition. It drew 45,585 visitors (including 1,372 on educational visits), exceeding a target of 30,000 and doubling attendance at the Ashmolean’s 2017 Imagining the Divine exhibition (21,249). Exit survey data from 1,583 visitors ( 5.1) revealed that Spellbound was attended by more first-time visitors than any previous Ashmolean exhibition (37%), with a marked increase in the 25–34 age bracket (accounting for 35% of survey respondents), roughly double the Ashmolean’s norm. Its reach was extended by a programme of workshops and public lectures (including a sell-out ‘Live Friday’: 2,600 visitors); catalogue sales of over 1,000; an outdoor advertising campaign (shortlisted as ‘Marketing Campaign of the Year’ at the 2019 Museums + Heritage Awards) with an estimated reach of 24,576,000; 131,995 unique visits to the website (more than for any previous Ashmolean show), and features on BBC South Today, BBC Radio Oxford, BBC Radio 3, and the BBC World Service. Total ticket sales grossed GBP395,965.50 ( 5.1) .

Media Reviews and Survey: According to the survey ( 5.1), visitors found Spellbound a deeply affecting, even transformative experience. 80% of survey respondents rated their experience as ‘excellent’ or ‘good’. The show was enthusiastically reviewed ( 5.2) in nearly 100 print and online publications (from flagship broadsheets, via specialist art and archaeological outlets, to personal blogs), and extensively praised on social media. It was declared to be ‘mesmerising’ ( The Times), ‘literally and metaphorically enchanting’, ‘truly magical’, ‘spellbinding’, ‘bewitching’ ( The Economist), ‘beguiling’, ‘beautiful and haunting’, ‘entrancing’, ‘captivating’, and ‘a dream come true for me’. The darker themes explored by the show in conjunction with its innovative and atmospheric architectural design meant that it was also ‘genuinely spooky’, ‘irresistibly creepy’ ( The Telegraph), ‘visceral’, ‘scary’, ‘eerie’, ‘unsettling’, ‘unusual’, ‘disturbing’, ‘unnerving’, ‘grim and compelling’, ‘exciting’, ‘chilling’, ‘macabre’, and a ‘wicked delight’, possessed of a ‘powerful energy’, and responsible for ‘many chills’ and a ‘shiver down the spine’ ( 5.2). For many commentators, Spellbound represented a profound exploration of what it means to be human. It was ‘enthralling and emotive’, ‘heartrending’, ‘surprisingly moving’, ‘powerful’, and ‘deeply though-provoking’. Writing in the Daily Mail, Bel Mooney concluded that ‘despite the advance of science and technology, people are pretty much the same under the skin as we always were […] That’s what Spellbound makes you realise’ ( 5.2). 70% of survey respondents reported that the show stimulated an awareness of the role of magical thinking in their own daily lives ( 5.1).

Many visitors ( 5.1, 5.2) found the gallery curated by Gaskill to be especially ‘shocking’, ‘stomach churning’, ‘painful’, and ‘heart-breaking’ - ‘the most potent [gallery] of all’ , according to The Lancet. Prints and drawings conveyed how men ‘really had a horror of older women’, while diagnostic devices such as the weighing chair drove home the ‘realities of witchcraft’. This gallery also communicated the complexity of accusations and the ‘intense emotional forces’ at work ( TLS). Writing in the Guardian ( 5.2), Maev Kennedy drew particular attention to Gaskill’s material discoveries, not least the length of ectoplasm from the Spiritualist medium, Helen Duncan (convicted under the Witchcraft Act and imprisoned in 1944, and previously the subject of a best-selling biography by Gaskill), found by Gaskill by pure chance in Cambridge University Library. Simon Ings ( Financial Times) observed that Gaskill’s gallery contained much of the ‘connective tissue’ of Spellbound’s argument, reporting that Gaskill ‘pulled off something remarkable: a series of cases that comprehensively pricks our assumptions, humanising not only those accused of witchcraft, but also their accusers’, and demonstrating that accusations ‘had far more to do with personal relationships and intense emotions than hysterical superstition’. Ings concluded that Spellbound ‘will make you want to be a kinder person’.

Inspiring a new Museum in Denmark: As proof of international impact, besides overseas visitors to the exhibition and the consequent boost to the visitor economy both national and international, Gaskill’s work helped inspire the design of Denmark’s first witchcraft museum in Ribe, opened in June 2020 and attracting over 10,000 visitors in its first month ( 5.3, 5.4). Having first met them informally, in December 2018, Gaskill invited the museum’s curators to a tour of Spellbound. The Danish team found the ‘design choices, art style, and atmosphere’ of Spellbound’s marketing campaign ‘stunning […] setting the mood in a wonderful way’ ( 5.4). In particular, but for Gaskill’s drawing their attention to the use of apotropaic charms scratched on doors and other surfaces, they would not have identified an important category of exhibits for their own museum, duly hunted down and now far better known as a result of their visit to Oxford ( 5.3). As reported by [* redacted text * redacted] ( 5.3), ‘None of this might have happened had I not met Professor Gaskill and visited his wonderful exhibition’.

Inspiring Artistic Expression and Impact on Creative Practices: Attracting further external media notice, Gaskill helped to produce two multimedia installations which contributed to his gallery’s emotional impact ( 5.7, 5.8). The first was an audio dramatization of the testimonies against two accused women from the East Anglian witchfinding campaign, 1645–47. With Gaskill’s guidance, an immersive booth displaying the original manuscripts from Cambridge University Library was created by radio producer Andy Jordan and sound designer Andy Cox, featuring the voice of Anton Lesser ( Game of Thrones etc.) as magistrate Thomas Castell. This was described by Museums Journal as ‘delivering the strongest emotional punch of the show’ (a verdict echoed across multiple reviews 5.2). As one blogger put it: ‘To read the confession of one accused witch – tormented by the death of her husband and children, and living in abject poverty – would be moving, but hearing it proved, appropriately, haunting’ ( 5.2).

The second such installation was Voracity I and II, a video and sculptural interpretation of early modern witch-trials by contemporary artist [* redacted *] ( 5.7, 5.8). One of three original highly praised artworks, and the result of a two-year collaboration with Gaskill, Voracity I is a filmic representation of the containment and explosion of emotion in witch-plagued communities (expressed the metaphor of fire and smoke), while Voracity II comprised domestic implements violently inscribed with the gendered language of witchcraft accusations. Informed by a relationship with Gaskill characterised by [*redacted*] as one of ‘creative dialogue’, ‘mutual understanding’, and ‘trust’, and inspired by visits arranged and guided by Gaskill to trial documents at Cambridge University Library and engravings at the Ashmolean, [*redacted*] felt compelled to work in film for the first time ( 5.7). She incorporated elements of ‘theatricality’, ‘exaggeration’, and ‘re-enactment’, and channelled her own ‘anger’ and ‘emotional intensity’. She felt ‘recalibrated’ by her experience, which for her has opened new professional and creative doors. Voracity was another inspiration internationally for the Ribe curatorial team: ‘an innovative, emotive idea that inspired a new concept for one of our rooms where we had not yet found the right angle; we’re now considering an artistic approach for this gallery’ ( 5.4).

Amongst other successes, in collaboration with historical cartoonist Hannah Sackett, Gaskill produced a comic, sold online and in the exhibition gift shop: A Most Certain, Strange and True Guide to Witchcraft ( 5.7 & 5.9). He also worked with storyteller Olivia Armstrong on a session delivered at the Ashmolean entitled Spellbound Stories ( 5.7), bringing accused seventeenth- century witch Anne Bodenham to ‘captivating’ new life.

Enhancing the awareness and interpretation of existing museum heritage, assisting with the production of new cultural artefacts, encouraging cultural tourism, stimulating the visitor economy, and in the process, through the popular dissemination of research previously targeted at an academic minority, delivering a powerful emotive stimulus, Gaskill’s work on Spellbound was both innovative and impactful. Its longer-term effects continue to resonate, not only in memory or print, but from Oxford to Denmark, both nationally and internationally.