As a kid I loved looking for fossils. The idea of finding a cast in stone of something that had lived millions of years ago, and moreover that anyone could find if they looked closely enough in the right place, has been a huge influence on me, as an artist and as a person.

When I first moved to Brighton many years ago I was, initially, very sad to find that there was little of palaeological interest in the near vicinity, but then I discovered that the beach, being bereft of actual sand, offers the possibility of finding some very odd shaped stones that, perhaps even better than fossils, allowed the imagination to wander in ways that prescribed shapes do not. I started collecting a few of the more singular ones when I was a student here, then life got in the way and I stopped, but now since I was on a daily task to revisit the extraordinary within the everyday, it seemed right to resurrect this habit.

So, along with (or as part of) the contact sheet of the day project, I decided that every day I should spend a bit of my time outside looking for an interesting stone, which I would then take home and photograph as the last image on the page.

I’ve now been doing this blog for a while (and the walks had been happening for a while before the project went public). As a result, I’ve now gathered quite a few stones together and they are becoming a representation of a somewhat longer journey.

So, for the first time, here they are, all together. More will follow once I’ve found enough to make new pages.

Please click on each image for bigger jpegs