A WEE COUNTY painter who has been sharing her insight into witchcraft trials in the area is taking her project a step further.

Karen Strang, artist based at Marcelle House in Alloa, is exploring the connection between the superstitious persecution of innocent women, control through fear and the early exploitation of land and people.

She has long had an interest in the subject and highlighted the injustice of the witch trials across a number of exhibitions and collaborative projects over the years.

Her research often takes her to local sites associated with the trials and to places where witchcraft allegedly took place.

Karen, who grew up in Tillicoultry and graduated from Glasgow School of Art, said: “When I was looking at the witchcraft sites, I saw that there was a direct connection between what had happened in those places and in very industrialised parts of Scotland.

“It overlapped with early coal mining, salt panning and quarrying which were the main and first heavy industries in Clackmannanshire.”

Some people in the Wee County made fortunes in the process with the area becoming a strategically-important economic powerhouse.

Karen, who is exploring the issues from the period before the Scottish Enlightenment, continued: “The people on the land were forced to work because of economic constraints, but also, Scotland had a particularly brutal way of dealing with the workforce in the mining and salt panning industries.

“In a sense, they were virtually enslaved.”

Indeed, a 1606 Act permanently bonded workers to their employers and those who sought to make a living elsewhere were punished like thieves if apprehended.

While they did receive wages, people could not leave the land and whole families were practically forced into serfdom – even the children were bound once they were christened.

That situation did not change until more than 150 years later and Karen is now focusing her research into how people were controlled and exploited through fear.

The artists added: “That to me is gruesome, but another fascinating twist in the development of the wealth of our nation.”

She argues landowners used the Roman classic “divide and rule” strategy and said: “If you have the people on the bottom pointing the finger at other people, they are not actually looking at who is controlling them.

“If you keep people in a state of fear then they are disempowered – whether that fear is superstition of witchcraft or the fear of starvation.”

Her research has opened a number of questions up, such as how can a community recover from the exploitation of the land and people, and how these are issues many areas may still face in modern days.

Karen continues her collaborative work with a number of others like writer and poet Katharine Macfarlane, musician and filmmaker Peter Drysdale, her old professor Alexander Moffat as well as writer and commentator Eileen Reid.