Mother Stone

Mother Stone
2025
Photo series and poem

Through Mother Stone is the documentation of a process, a little ritual, pushing a soft sculpture through a standing stone. This stone, standing alone off an A-road in Minchinhampton, is locally known as Mother Stone and it is said that babies were once passed through its holes to cure them of whooping cough. Indeed I witnessed a woman visiting to put her ankle through the stone to heal it, so I joined her and poked my wrist through to see if it would help with my RSI. 

I visited this precious stone twice on two separate residencies at The Hide nearby, and felt compelled to return to it and will again. On the second visit I brought a sculpture made of found hand-knitted babyhats, Sibling 02, and pushed it through the stone as a moment of reflection and contemplation. I documented the sculpture pushing through and emerging from the stone, a re-birth of sorts, which became this photography series and poem. 

The photos abstract the process: surfaces of soft and hard merge, brand new and time-old. Man-made acrylic brushes against natural lichen, and geometric knit and purl forms push through the wild randomness of moss and weathered stone. A soft crowning occurs - forced, encouraged, relief.  

Mother Stone

The Minchinhampton Longstone,
Said to frolic across the common at midnight, 
And heal babies passed through its ancient holes.

It refuses to be pulled or toppled, 
A gnarled and timeless tooth,
As old as any henge or barrow worth its salt.

I passed it through the birth stone - 
Between the moss-softened offerings,
And asked it ‘one or two?’

Heart to pock-marked heart, 
I listened and it told me. 
I gasped with fresh relief.