They Call Me Witch
Artist & Works
Elisha Enfield


Elisha Enfield’s work delves into the layered histories of human rituals, examining the shifting boundaries between absence and presence. Drawing from stories of fire and funerary rites, her paintings explore the macabre beauty of shared practices that traverse joy, reverence, and loss. These moments, tethered to history, resonate with contemporary questions about how we remember, mourn, and celebrate. Throughout her work, Enfield explores how collective rituals and spectral narratives help us navigate a world without the ones we love, inviting the viewer to linger in those liminal spaces where memory and myth entwine. Enfield studied painting at the University of Brighton, graduating in 2011. Recent achievements include selection for the BEEP Painting Biennial, Jackson’s and Cass Art Prizes, and ING Discerning Eye, where she has received both the Landscape and Midlands Prizes. Winner of Sky Arts Landscape Artist of the Year 2022, her work is held in public and private collections worldwide.


ins: @elishaenfield




Entrance I
 
Oil on Wood Panel

13cm X 18cm, 2025

£1020


Fire! (The Dance)

Oil on Paper

19cm X 19cm, 2024

£600



At the heart of Enfield’s works is fire; or more specifically, burnings. Both destructive and celebratory, communal and isolating, bonfires mark cycles: endings and beginnings, harvest and renewal. They also carry the darker weight of ritual, sacrifice and erasure.These paintings draw on the German celebration of Walpurgisnacht or Hexennacht, the night when witches are said to gather on mountain tops, and fires are lit to ward off malevolent forces. In this space between winter and summer, fear and festivity intertwine. The bonfire becomes both a warning and a welcome, a boundary between what is cast out and what is invited in.Burnings are inextricably bound to the history of witchcraft in the cultural imagination, yet those condemned to the flames were not witches, but people. Ordinary women and men caught in the fires of fear, politics and superstition. Enfield’s paintings reframe these histories, finding in the blaze a site of both remembrance and renewal. The figures who once gathered around or perished within the flames become echoes of resilience and transformation. Through paint, fire is no longer purely destructive, but a force through which memory, myth and humanity are continually remade



Geist I

Oil on Wood Panel

18cm X 13cm, 2024




In Enfield’s Geist paintings, domestic spaces and objects such as glass figurines, crockery and ornaments are visited by floating lights. The familiar becomes spectral, as if memory itself flickers within.

These are quiet hauntings of the everyday, where objects once seen as decorative or familiar are transformed into vessels of endurance and renewal. Each glowing flame suggests what persists beyond silencing.

Through reflection and illumination, Enfield turns the domestic into a space of quiet magic and remembrance.


Geist II

Oil on Wood Panel

20cm X 30cm, 2024


Geist III


Oil on Wood Panel

30cm X 19cm, 2024


Geist IV


Oil on Wood Panel

20cm X 15cm, 2024