Woman On Stone

Woman On Stone is a photographic body of work about stone, memory, rupture, and return. Made across Ireland, Scotland, and other threshold landscapes, the series moves between ruin, animal, ritual object, self-portrait, and weather.
 

The work is rooted in a poem from Pablo Neruda’s Stones of the Sky that I memorized as a teenager and have carried as a private fragment for decades. In these images, stone becomes witness, landscape becomes body, and the act of touching becomes a way of remembering.

The series is also haunted by histories of women pushed to the edges of the official record. One of these histories is that of the Wrens of the Curragh: nineteenth-century Irish women who lived at the margins of society and took shelter in rough hollows in the ground. I do not see this work as an illustration of their lives, but their story sharpened my understanding of landscape as a place of both refuge and abandonment.