Stone at theundergroundstream

 

Lark stone | 2016 | Still from digital documentation of live action | 2m 8s of video with sound

 

I'm delighted to be joining Susie David in a show she's curated called Stone.

“Seven artists consider stone in its simplest, rawest form – a rawness that provides oblique allegories: for deep time, for resistance, for nurturing, and for healing.”

Gretchen Faust | Jem Southam | Megan Calver & Gabrielle Hoad | Maxine Foster | Steve Thorpe | Susie David

Megan and I are showing Lark stone that we made with Susie back in 2016 during a collaboration at Dawlish Warren.

The simple gesture of turning a piece of chert in the hand conjures the song of a skylark: the weight and inertness of the stone contrasting with the bird’s energetic movements and song. The stone sings along, squeaking gently as it is handled.

Stone
theundergroundstream
Home Farm, Churchstow TQ7 2QR
By appointment, weekdays 2-5pm until 30 August 2025

The walls tremble...

 

I'm embarking on a new solo moving image project, provisionally titled The walls tremble, the furniture stamps its feet.*

It's about female spirit mediums of the late 19th and early 20th century. During séances, mediums would demonstrate the presence of other-worldly forces by the tilting of tables and the animation of other domestic objects. Some of this activity was taken to be genuine; on other occasions it proved to be cleverly engineered conjuring tricks. I like this blurring of boundaries; this rubbing up of belief against scepticism, nature against artifice, art against science.

While my end-goal is the making of a short film, which has its own language of trickery and haunting, I find myself heading down quite a sculptural path. I've been looking at ways to make domestic objects tremble, wobble and vibrate. By initiating the visible movement of things we think of as inert or static, I'm acknowledging their agency but also hoping to set in motion - or at least suggest - something more unexpected and strange.

I'm hopeful these misbehaving objects will act as a symbol of the way Victorian certainties were being disrupted by rapid developments in science and technology as well as by massive social change.

*I've drawn my title from an account of a séance by a French journalist in 1857, sourced via an article 'The medium on the stage' by Simone Natale (2011) in Early Popular Visual Culture 9:3 239-255

Stop and look around

Hiding places (home from home) | 2025 | Digital print 

 

 

 

With new collaborative work coming to a standstill, Megan Calver and I have been turning over our archive to keep some kind of joint practice alive. What at first seemed like a stop-gap has turned into an interesting and productive experience.

The film The Signal and the Noise that I completed early this year was our first step in this direction. Megan was able to join me in generating some new footage, but the film's overall motivation was to summarise our making from the past 2-3 years in filmic form.

Now we're looking back over the past five years of work (and occasionally further) to resurrect ideas that were set aside – not because they were bad but because they didn't quite fit the moment. It's interesting what you understand with hindsight: how something you saw as preparatory or experimental adds up to something more substantial in the light of future developments.

For example, we had a series of mobile phone pics of us standing in a field with our coats on our heads. The action was serious but the documentation was casual. When Laura Porter approached us about contributing to a group show called Our Place at Studio KIND. earlier this year, we decided to do a little more production work on the images and stitch two of them together to put our effaced bodies in dialogue. The new print is titled Hiding places (home from home).

Now we've been selected for a show called Where are we now? at Thelma Hulbert Gallery in the autumn. We're drawing on some almost accidental shots we took of trees by flash-light at Durlston Country Park while in residence there back in 2022. The shots sat in a Google Photos album waiting for their moment and I'm about to get three of them printed up to gallery scale with a new accompanying text to make Night Piece (Swimming with Trees).

Although I work within certain repeating themes, I'm often focused on keeping forward momentum – and with some reason. I've found that galleries and commissioners usually seek out work that's no more than two years old. But that's resolved work. Few artists are short of ideas; it's having the time and resources to realise them that's challenging.

It's good sometimes to stop and properly explore what you've done, not just what you're going to do next. This moment of pause and reflection is turning out to be quite rewarding.