CRONES/KÆLLINGER/KÄRRINGAR

RECLAIMING THE WISE WOMAN in a New portrait campaign

I am curious about age. I always have been. Age has never made much sense to me. I’ve met people who felt ancient though their years were few, and others who carried the lightness of youth well into their later decades. There’s something about the way we talk about age that feels too linear, too small for what it actually holds.

In the natural world, age is power. Orcas live in matriarchal pods, led by elder, post-menopausal females whose experience and memory guide the entire group to food, safety, and survival. Elephants do the same. The oldest females hold the stories of migration, of drought, food, birth, and of death. They are not dismissed or left to die once they are no longer young and fertile. They are the leaders. The keepers. The heart of the herd. They carry the wisdom to lead the new generation to prosper.

Somewhere along the way, we forgot how to do that in our human society.

In our culture, we treat age as something to be managed, softened, or hidden. Especially in women. We celebrate youth as if it were proof of worth, and treat the passage of time as a loss rather than an expansion.
The wisdom that life brings should be revered, honoured, and fully celebrated.

All my life, I've struggled to fully understand what age means. Time goes by and we become older, yet for me, everything has gone so very fast that it feels fruitless to hold on. I still feel like I did when I was a teenager, like when I was in my 20s and in my early 30s. Sure, I'm a different person in so many ways, but my thirst for life, my humour, my story are intact. But I see my body suit deteriorate. It's the fact of life. I see the beginnings of tiny wrinkles dancing next to my eyes. Scars where stories left their mark. Laughter embedded next to my mouth in the crevices of my smile lines. The stark forehead wrinkles burying themselves into my skin, the way the worries that brought them burrowed themselves into my heart.

Time.

Time leaves its mark. Yet it also carries the wisdom of a life well lived. Experiences that have left their own impressions.

The word Crone has its origin in Middle English, “a feeble and withered old woman," and from Anglo-French carogne "carrion, carcass; an old ewe.” Both meanings are clearly not terms of endearment. On the contrary. They describe someone, a woman, old and decaying. Used as an insult, the word has a lot in common with its Scandinavian counterparts (In Danish, kælling, and in Swedish, kärring) that both came to mean the equivalent of an old hag. Even today, those words are severely derogatory and are rarely used in any comfortable and loving situation.
Yet, the Scandinavian words came from kerling in Old Norse, which just used to mean “a woman”. It later developed and became something wrangled into an insult, yet often used about the women who were too loud, had too much knowledge or too many opinions.

Going back to the idea of the Crone, in neopaganism, it represents the later life cycle of womanhood. Mother, Maiden, Crone.
She is the one who carries the lived experiences of the two former iterations. Part of a holy trinity of womanhood, she represents the power we all have within and who we all, eventually, will reach, just through the pure act of living.

The Crone is not fragile or finished. She carries the fire of the Maiden and the strength of the Mother. She is intuition, memory, and the quiet authority that comes from having lived through it all. In her, there is no need to prove or perform. She doesn’t have to. She simply knows.

Somewhere along the way, this image of the woman in her later season, the Crone, kællingen, kärringen, became something to ridicule. Hunched over, wart on her nose, a crooked, toothless smile.
The words were never particularly kind; at most, they were neutral, but they became words that carried a clear message: the old woman had lost her use. She no longer belonged in the centre of things.
The transformation of those words over time shows exactly how uncomfortable the world has become with women who no longer serve a purpose defined by youth, fertility, or beauty. The fact that these words sting says something about the culture that shaped them.

And this is why I want to reclaim them. Not to rewrite history, but to refuse its verdict. To say that the women who came before us deserve more than silence and erasure. To give shape and visibility to a stage of life that has been spoken about with disdain, or worse, fear, for far too long.

I don't want to fear age. I want to embrace it. The knowledge it brings. The wrinkles. The crinkles. The beauty of giving less of a fuck. And I want my nieces to feel the same way. Not to chase youth in a futile hunt for something time will inevitably take away.

This project and campaign are about that reclamation. About language, acceptance, and presence.
About stepping into the space that those words tried to shrink. About saying them out loud and letting them belong to us free from the ridicule, not as insults, but as reminders of strength, experience, and truth.

The Crones Campaign exists because I want to see women as they are, in the season they’re in. And I want to see them stand in that proudly and hopefully inspire others to do the same.
I want to create images that honour time rather than conceal it. To build a visual archive of women who have lived, and who are ready to be seen and not hidden away behind the constant celebration of artificial youth.

It will become an exhibition, maybe more, and, eventually, hopefully, a book. A collection of portraits that speak to what it means to age as a woman today, when the world still insists on pretending that youth is the only currency worth holding.

I want to do this because I believe that when we reclaim the language used against us, we change how we see ourselves. We return the power that was taken. We create space for every woman who will come after to grow older without apology and without fear of disappearing.

That is the why. That is the work.

In nature, the elders lead the way.
Maybe it’s time we remembered how to do the same.

If this resonates, it could be because something in you remembers. Remembers what it felt like to be silenced, to make yourself smaller, to be spoken over. Remembers watching older women fade from the frame, as if their time had passed, and their wisdom no longer belonged in the light.

This work is an invitation to step back into that light. To claim it as your own. To take the words that were used to diminish and make them sacred. To remind the world, and ourselves, that the older woman, the Crone, is not an ending. She is continuity. She is history. She is the one who carries the map that will lead the way for the next generations. And in that, is the most indescribable beauty to be found.

That is why I’m doing this. Because we need to see the faces. We need to look at them and recognise ourselves, our mothers, our grandmothers, and every woman who will one day stand where they are now.

Crones is a call to visibility and a strength that is only won by living.