Standing Stone Butch 01 (March 2025)

Hard Candy Axeheads, Impulse Terrain, Lithic Practices, Transitional materials, a poem, and what’s coming up

Hello,

This is my first monthly (paid) subscriber post documenting my current body of work “Standing Stone Butch”.

Hard Candy Axeheads, Impulse Terrain, Lithic Practices, Transitional materials

This past month I was focussed on mainly on creating new, unresolved work for the group show I was part of at Conditions in Croydon, entitled “Impulse Terrain”. I’ve been spending long hours in my small kitchen, boiling sugar and isomalt to create hard strawberry flavouring “rocks”, and then knapping these rocks as neolithic peoples did with flint and other materials, in an attempt to make axehead like artefacts.

This time in the kitchen set me to thinking around sugar as a transitional material- it alchemically turns from powder to liquid to solid and then melts back into a liquid. A hard sticky lump, worked up until the point that it cracks and fails. I make continuous attempts despite the fact that failure is guaranteed. Each time I sat down to knap an axehead from this brittle, perishable material, I would inevitably hit it too hard and break the piece.