The Writing of Stones

“A stone does not live or maybe it does, maybe it lives like us. We might be like stones to them, who knows. I wish we did, they are one of the many mysteries, to me anyway.” Gin Rimmington Jones, aged 14. I have collected stones my whole life, as if in their weight and density the curvature of time is made manifest. When you hold a stone it is as if you are holding time. Taking inspiration from Roger Caillois’ book of the same name, The Writing of Stones is a conjuring of matter, space and time from two distinct landscapes: the complex beauty of a marble quarry and the shifting planes of a weather sculpted limestone gorge. A poetic and philosophical encounter with the earth and its surfaces, the work considers the intersecting narratives of humans and the natural world writ large in its stones. This body of work is the result of two artist residencies at Joya-AiR, Almeria, Spain in 2019 and 2020, a remote, semi-desert area that I felt immediately connected to. I had no language for the encounter; I was fascinated by the hot, bone-white terrain of the dry-baked gorge of the Los Gasquez region and the smooth white planes of an imposing marble quarry. The clash between the innate beauty of the natural environment and human enterprise was a rich seam of exploration; the perfect prism to consider the forces that alter the planet. Working daily in quiet solitude, I felt as though I had been walking with the soul of the earth, where the solemnity of these lithic spaces puts the brevity of our human season into context. Shifting between abstraction and representation, my work uses scale and in-camera multi-exposure techniques to challenge the instant appeal of traditional landscape photography and present a more layered experience of landscape for the viewer. When I am working it is as if I am sculpting time. Each image in The Writing of Stones expresses this deep, metaphysical connection to stone. They encourage us to reflect upon how the image, itself an instrument of time, in conjunction with imagination, can conjure spaces that put into perspective our brief strut on this planet.