Stone Club Walks and Talks

In today's episode we talk with aritst and writer Jackie Morris & stained glass artist Tamsin Abbott. We discuss Jackie and Tamsin's forthcoming book Wild Folk: Tales from the Stones. We discuss the ancient sites and tales that make up the book as well as the process of how the book was created. We talk about art, imagination and nature and discuss some of the authors that have influenced Jackie and Tamsin. WILD FOLK is a beautifully illustrated sequence of seven tales, marking the first book length collaboration between the storyteller artists, Tamsin Abbott and Jackie Morris. Each of the seven tales are fables of transformation and power, summoned from the ancient stones beneath our feet and transformed by word and image into portals between past and future. The tales are neither new nor old. They are full of ‘wild folk’, shape-shifting spirits that carry the energy that connects all things.

Today we feature Lally MacBeth, founder of The Folk Archive and Stone Club co-founder. We chat about The Folk Archive, Lally's Magazine The Folk Review and also about The Lost Folk, Lally's forthcoming debut book which is due to be published by Faber in June 2025. We discuss folk customs, folk music Krampus and a very large snowman. Lally MacBeth is an artist, writer & curator based in Cornwall, England. Lally graduated from Central Saint Martins in 2013 with a First Class Honours in Fashion History & Theory, and has since divided her time between being sensible and silly. Her work wanders the line between the real and the imaginary, taking in history, folklore, performance, ritual, and artifice along the way. She is interested in the links between high and low cultural artefacts and how these lines are often blurred in archives.

In this episode we talk with artist Alex Hartley about his latest artwork The Summoning Stones which features in the exhibition Dartmoor: A Radical Landscape at RAMM. We talk about Alex's practice with sculpture and photography. About walks on Dartmoor, the energy of ancient standing stones and the transfer of energy with modern technology. We discuss access to nature and climate change and Alex's artistic influences. Alex Hartley is an artist whose work destabilises ideas of both iconic architecture and nature by exploring our understanding of utopian ideologies. Extending into ambitious works of land art, employing his practice to test our notions of utopia, the individual, and the critical relationship we have with the environment that questions how we occupy the world's wild places.

In this episode we talk with archaeologist Dr Jennifer Wexler about Stonehenge, Grime's Graves, Thronborough Henges and ancient Cornish sites as well as discussing Jennifer's journey in archaeology and in curating exhibitions. Including work in Sicily and the USA. Jennifer works as a prehistorian for English Heritage and is the former Project curator of The World of Stonehenge exhibition at the British Museum. She specializes in archaeological landscapes, and the prehistoric and ancient archaeology of the Mediterranean and Western Europe.