As the name suggests, this is a group of people who have a fascination with ancient stone monuments. Founded by artists Lally MacBeth and Matthew Shaw, Stone Club encourages people to pause and think about 'place' in new ways. Their aim is to connect ancient sites through community and conversation and to bring new perspectives to prehistory in a collaborative and inclusive way.
Last night's event consisted of a series of talks. The first, by Tate Britain archivist Victoria Jenkins, was a dip into the Tate's extensive collection of artworks and photographs that relate to ancient stones. In particular, there were some lovely old images taken by members of the St Ives group of artists - it's no great secret that people like Dame Barbara Hepworth, Peter Lanyon and Ben Nicholson were inspired by Cornish Neolithic sites. I also treated myself to a copy of Victoria's beautiful new book, Visions of the Occult, and she has promised to let me have a look around in the Tate archives, which will be amazing.
The second talk was by a familiar face, my good friend Dr David Bramwell, who presented his audio-visual show The Cult of Water. I blogged about this talk here back in October. It's a fantastic autobiographical and semi-spiritual adventure in sound and pictures where David follows the polluted river Don back to its clean natural source. You can watch a recorded version of the same talk from last year's Brighton Fringe here.
The final talk was Stanley Schtinter’s Journey to Avebury. Back in 1971, the soon-to-be avant-garde film director Derek Jarman created a series of films on a Super 8 cine camera. One depicted a journey to the Avebury stone circle complex in Wiltshire. To mark the 50th anniversary in 2021, Schtinter recreated the journey on his iPhone, which meant identifying exactly where Jarman had been and trying to duplicate the original film shot-by-shot. It's an extraordinary tribute to Jarman's career and it was fascinating to see the two films side by side and to witness how the landscape has changed in half a century.
Here is Jarman's original film:
It was an interesting and entertaining night out and it was lovely to bump into Mat Clayton, my editor from several books ago, and artist Ben Edge who I featured here.
If you want to know more about Stone Club, visit their site here.
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