Artists' Spare Room | Georgie Mac

I'm Georgie Mac, a visual artist and zine maker based in Glasgow. My practice centres around drawing. My work is influenced by nature's weirder, more mysterious aspects—lichen, fungal networks, and those tiny beings that lurk just beyond our reach. This week was a chance to explore the outdoors, expand my mental library of natural forms, and make some new friends (human and non-human alike).

I came to Penrith with a retro-looking camcorder ready to document my explorations. The feeling of the camera in my hand was very nostalgic. I had a lot of fun flipping its tiny screen out whenever I saw something interesting – mostly local animals, a cockerel, crows, and more than a few kinds of cow. I love animals, and my week at the Old Fire Station helped me clarify that animism is an essential theme in my work. Animism attributes life to all matter, including animals, plants, inanimate objects, and natural phenomena. As religious studies scholar Graham Harvey puts it: "Animists are people who recognise that the world is full of persons. Only some of whom are human."

This kind of expansive thinking helped me narrow my explorations for the week, and my ears shot upward when I heard about a few impressive Neolithic stone structures in the area. Rocks and stones are often personified in media as clumsy giants and grunting brutes. I wondered if some research might help shift these human-centred assumptions. Are stones alive? I wondered what they might teach us.

The lovely folks at Eden Arts suggested I check out Mayburgh Henge, an easy walk from the Old Fire Station, and it turned out to be my favourite experience of the week. Mayburgh has a circular bank with a single standing stone in the centre, and when I arrived, a friendly group of geophysicists was investigating the site. I learned they were imaging beneath the soil to find evidence of other standing stones. According to them, the original site may have been a stone circle that was either destroyed or moved, and their scientific instruments were building an underground picture without disturbing the site.

I sat on the bank's edge to draw the henge in my sketchbook and reflected on the picture-making process. While the scientists were probing the ground, measuring magnetic and radioactive data with their machines – I was reacting to the light bouncing from the stone into my eyes and translating that data through my hand onto the page. And there was something else, a feeling? When I draw, I also translate an emotional state onto the page. The more I sketched, the more I felt connected to the stone - and my drawing is a record of that interaction. It reminded me of something I'd read by anthropologist Gregory Bateson: "We only witness relationships, not things in themselves." It made me think of the many non-human visitors that keep this place alive: the nesting birds in nearby trees, the wildflowers, the mushrooms, and the tiny beasts that feast beneath the ground. When did I last notice a stone (Neolithic or otherwise)? When was the last time I felt connected to a stone? Mayburgh Henge helped me realise that looking at a stone means taking the time to be present – noticing the intricate web of relationships around you and recognising that we are, and always have been, part of the same intertwining picture of nature.

I also visited Castlerigg Stone Circle, which was equally impressive as Mayburgh, and I would have liked to visit Long Meg and her Daughters (another Neolithic site). Still, I wanted to leave something for a future visit. I made two zines on my final day at Eden Arts. STONE-WISE collects some of my drawings and reflections, and Creatures in Cumbria is a photo-zine full of animals I met on my travels. I concluded the residency with a roughly cut video, combining my animal and stone interactions from the week. It looked like a shaky holiday video, and I'm pleased with how it turned out. It's not going to win any film awards, but I think it succeeds in what any hastily made home video should – it helps you remember a happy memory from a time well spent.

Thanks, Eden Arts!

You can watch a short video edit of Georgie here.