Tell me a bit about your project, particularly the influences behind it. 

Sure. At the moment I'm working on projects looking primarily at standing stones, stone circles, dolmens, and ancient stone structures. I'm really interested in the unseen fragility of them. They've existed in our countryside for so long,  thousands of years. It's a time span that we're not familiar with on a day-to-day level. We imagine them as a very static, sort of permanent, unchanging landmarks that the rest of the world revolves around. But, in reality, they're constantly evolving, just over a longer time period than we're used to. What we're left with now is mostly ruins. The earth has been ploughed out, stones have been lost, taken, reused, and it’s that unseen fragility that I'm interested in exploring, how it relates to our modern lives. The perceived permanence is almost more shocking than when things are lost. I think a good example of that is our changing environment. For a long time it's been taken for granted that we'll have this nice, habitable environment that we can thrive in, and now it's changing. Weather's becoming more extreme, and predictions for the future aren't looking too great. It’s really hitting home now. On personal levels, with relationships, when they suddenly break down or when you lose someone very close to you, a lot of the time it happens suddenly or, even when it doesn't, you've never really thought of a time that they're not going to be there. So, when it happens, it really impacts those feelings of grief. 

 

Do you think that's why you chose to focus on the prehistoric stone monuments, and how they relate to grief for the project? 

Yeah, especially with the dolmens. They're considered sort of burial chambers, or areas where the dead would be laid to rest. There is that connection with those practices. But again, there's always that slight unknowing. You can't be 100% sure what any of them were used for really. That knowledge is long gone, so we can only interpret them as best we can. 

 

With sites, I think about the people that have been through that same spot in the landscape over thousands of years, what's happened there, those generational links, and trying to connect to previous generations is something I'm interested in. I like to, for my reference material, document the monuments. I do that through photography. I use my late grandfather's camera. I'm not a great photographer. And I'm not one hundred percent sure on all the correct settings. I liked that idea of that connection to the past, but with some knowledge lost in between and the results that are generated.

 

What's the relationship between the stones and the landscape in your practice, in relation to the disconnection that you once felt in with your environment, particularly in your current location in the southwest of England? 

Growing up in the southwest, they're sort of embedded in my childhood. Growing up camping on Dartmoor, visiting Bodmin Moor, Cornwall, West Wales, and the main proliferation of these stone monuments are down the western side of the UK, I think primarily because that was where the resources were, these giant stones. They've always been part of my landscape to some degree, driving past them, visiting them, passing them on walks, and I just never really thought about it too deeply. They’re always just there. 

 

I went to a talk by a photographer David R. Abram the year before last, and he mentioned that the nearest stone circle to Bristol was the circle at Stanton Drew, and honestly, I'd never heard of them. It turns out they're literally a two and a half hour walk from my front door. I was shocked and surprised how something so impressive can almost still be hidden. 

 

In the last couple of years there's been a massive resurgence of interest, particularly from younger people, in standing stones and folk subjects in general. What do you think has caused that? 

Yeah, I mean, it's definitely exploded over the last couple of years. Maybe it was because of the lockdown, when travel was restricted, perhaps people started looking in their own back gardens a little more. I think it focused an appreciation on the outdoors that some people had previously taken for granted. When we were able to explore again, a bit further afield, people took that opportunity to get out and started discovering things in their local environment and in the immediate vicinity of where they were living. 

 

It's been a pretty turbulent political period as well. There doesn't seem to be an awful lot of good news. I don't think it's necessarily people harking back to a better time in the past, I think it's more that people are just interested in really getting to know their local environment and the regional stories. People are finding out that our country is actually a lot more varied than they think. We've never been isolated. I think it's that mixture that brought out that interest. That’s how it happened for me anyway. 

 

Did your interest in stones originate from incorporating them into your work, or did you develop this fascination independently before integrating it into your art? 

I think they came together at the same time. I was studying for an MA in printmaking last year. And what that academic route forces you to do is to really analyse your work, on quite a minute level, and really think about the meanings behind why you're making what you're making. I'd always been interested in folklore imagery, and I'm a big fan of medieval manuscripts as well. I originally studied illustration. I was drawn naturally to that more illustrative side, but it was through analysing and critiquing my work over the MA that I realised things didn't necessarily have to be so literal pictorially, even though it might look like they are just pictures of stones in my work, I'm trying to create atmospheres and link personal feelings into the work at the same time. 

 

I think you can see the really strong link with time in your work.

Yeah, that's what I'm trying to get at. For the skies and backgrounds there's a technique called monoprinting, where you lay down a layer of ink and then wipe away the ink with cloth. Although I'll print an edition of each one, the skies will be subtly different. You can never replicate that. Across the edition, you kind

of get that sense of clouds moving across the landscape. It’s those little things I'm trying to introduce that contrast with that seeming sort of permanence of the stones. 

 

It's really nice to see how your print work reflects your feelings about stones.Yeah, it’s about variation. I think print can be quite repetitive. It's a process-driven way of working. It's a repetitive process. You're repeating it and producing an edition of the same, or similar, prints. I don’t visit these monuments just once. I like to go back to the same ones and there's a sense of that repetition, but whenever I go back, they're never the same. Whether it's the weather, or the time of day, you always see these monuments in a slightly different light. I think that change in the repetition is what I'm trying to capture in the work.

 

Who or what are your influences?

Music plays a big part. Artists that can generate atmosphere in their work. Steve Von Till is a big inspiration. 

 

He's being interviewed for this issue! 

Oh amazing. That new album, Triptych part one, is just amazing, and the music for Monoliths, yeah, so great. Emma Ruth Rundle as well, big fan of her work, and Anna von Hausswolff. Hausswolff incorporates a mixture of traditional singer-songwriter type work, but she also plays the organ. She plays and records organs in these massive European city cathedrals, and it just generates such a sound that it almost feels imposing just listening to it. I have a lot of other music influences, but I think my favourite printmaker would be Norman Ackroyd. He uses a process called aquatint which is sort of like etching. It's a completely different process to how I work, but the atmosphere in his work is just unbelievable. He does a lot of seascapes, like crags, and rocks, and the weather driving waves into cliffs and things like that. The atmosphere generated in his work is just, yeah, really, really amazing. 

 

Ok, final question. I think for you it's probably the equivalent of being asked what your favourite song is, but what is your favourite stone? 

Oh, that's tricky. There's a few. I love Stanton Drew, just because it's my local. I've been there a lot. The three circles and the cove there, it's like a whole complex and it's really nice being able to see that across the seasons. Trethevy Quoit in Cornwall is amazing just for the scale of it. As you walk up, it's a dolmen structure, but it's got a, I think naturally formed, hole in the capstone. You can see why that capstone was chosen, and especially having that naturally formed hole, you can imagine gazing through it. I don't know if it's aligned to any celestial bodies or anything, but I’d like to think it is. Yeah, I think that one's probably one of my favourites. I've got a summer planned trying to hit the southwest of Cornwall, St Ives area, and also the Pembrokeshire area of Wales, to gather some more reference material. So they might change. One day I'll make it up to Orkney.