Ah, late October. Pumpkins, skeletons, and waiting for daylight saving time to really kickstart the SAD. Halloween is but round the corner, holding an enormous plastic axe and insisting that you give it all your sweets.
It’s been hard to miss the occult’s ascension into popular culture over the last few years. From The Love Witch’s pitch-perfect inversion of the cliched Bell, Book and Candle-style romance; actual witches casting a binding spell on Trump “so that his malignant works may fail utterly” (might be working, hard to tell)—and more recently a hex on Brett Kavanaugh—through to Vogue’s ‘Witchy Week’ and the breakaway success of the supernatural on the screen. With Hereditary, the reimaginings of The Haunting of Hill House and Suspiria, and the return of Sabrina the now-grown-up witch, it seems like these days everyone’s chalking a design on their living room floor, riding backwards on a broomstick, and finding the ghosts of their family hiding beneath the reality that they tread daily.
I’ve spent most of this season of harvests and mists in a small room unpacking boxes, having recently moved house out of the city. And so, with the moon glowering into my window, dragging my possessions out of storage has provided a nice excuse to look at the way that a certain perceived “witchiness” and lingering strains of the occult bleed through in design, from books to records, publications and fine art.
Hexus Press is due to release Oliver Zarandi’s collection Soft Fruit in the Sun, alongside Hexus Journal III in 2019.