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Arthur's Stone

Arthur's Stone is a set of six colour negative images by Newth first shown at ‘The Stone of Folly’, an exhibition curated by William Cobbing at the Down Stairs Gallery in Hereford 29 September – 18 November 2012. The photographs were made using a cardboard camera obscura, which set up a direct sculptural correspondence with the subject photographed - a Neolithic burial site in Herefordshire. Shadows of the pins used to attach the paper inside the camera obscura remain as visible traces of the hands-on process. The use of a large lens emphasised the detail of the stone and the resulting bright magenta negative invoked its mythical status. The images, aesthetically and practically, reference an Oxymel negative photograph of Arthur’s Stone made in 1856 by John Dillwyn Llewelyn – an historic trigger for the work. Newth's photographs are an exploration of the material properties of the photograph and the sculptural or concrete characteristics of the photographic process. They investigate the relationship between the photographic apparatus and the images produced.

Arthur's Stone relates to other work by Newth that has involved construction of a camera obscura referencing early photographic technologies. Newth’s exhibit ‘The Imagination of Children’ at the V&A Museum of Childhood, 15 October 2011 - 5 February 2012, explored sculptural properties of the photographic apparatus, using a Toy Box Camera. Here the camera itself became the exhibit, playfully revealing the spatial/sculptural potential of the photographic process rather than the photographic print as product. The apparatus, made from brightly coloured toy packaging and a toy magnifying glass, became the subject of the work. The inversion of the projected image (visible inside the camera) mirrored this shift from photographic product to apparatus, and the act of looking ‘photographically’.