Artists: HOLLY ANTRUM, MIKE COOTER, WILLIAM COBBING, KATIE CUDDON, BENEDICT DREW,
MARTIN NEWTH, FRANCESCO PEDRAGLIO, HEATHER PHILLIPSON, NICHOLAS POPE, TOM WOOLNER.

The exhibition The Stone of Folly references Arthur’s Stone, a Neolithic site in the Golden Valley, nearby Down Stairs, which has become the subject of local folklore and forgotten histories.

The site incorporates a broken glacial boulder resting on an ancient burial chamber, where King Arthur (Owd Artur) mythically slew a giant, leaving indentations of his elbows in the stone as he fell to the ground. Over the years, the morphology of the stone has changed due to it being quarried, with the rubble being used in local buildings. The term ‘stone of folly’ comes from a medieval allegory of madness and stupidity (akin to “rocks in the head”), referenced in Hieronymus Bosch’s painting ‘The Stone Operation’ (1488), in which a surgeon is depicted removing a stone-like lump from a patient’s head, accompanied by the inscription “Master, cut the stone out quickly / My name if Lubbert Das.”

A publication accompanies the exhibition featuring a specially commissioned text by Jonathan P. Watts.

'Using a bespoke cardboard camera I made a series of colour negative images of Arthur’s Stone. The intention was to set up a correspondence between the sculptural qualities of the camera and raw materiality of the stone. The camera is just a cardboard box, but it has a very large lens on the front. This large lens means that a lot of detail can be recorded including the texture of the rock. Instead of using photographic film I pin sheets of colour, c-type photographic paper cut from a roll, inside the box. The record of the process is partly visible in the shadows of the pins on the image. These pinholes are used again to display the work when the paper is pinned inside the frames. The red is due to the filters I use, which are designed to make the exposure reasonably constant.  The principle being that I could make positives from them.  I didn’t.  Instead I showed the actual negative images that were made on site. For me, this stresses material nature of photography and allows some echo of the process. It correlates with very early photographic technologies and, compared to the way photographs might normally be viewed,  slows down the reading of the image.'