The Stone That Guards The Gate

The Stone That Guards the Gate is painted on repurposed Welsh slate, allowing the stone’s weight, fractures and previous use to remain visible within the work. Layers of oil, oil pastel and oil stick gather into a compact, luminous form that suggests a guardian, threshold or standing stone.

The image hovers between abstraction, landscape and artefact. Its dark slate surface carries associations of geological time, extraction and shelter, while the painted marks introduce a sense of heat, warning and transformation. The work imagines the stone not simply as a support, but as an active presence positioned at the edge of an unknown passage.