Tom Glencross is an artist and writer born in Scunthorpe and working in Leeds. Their work is concerned with the codes and myths of folklore, work and labour; social histories and their reproduction; gender, masculinities and alienation; and queer working-class experiences.
THE OLD STONES is Tom’s ongoing photographic documentary of Neolithic folk art and rock carvings, amongst the oldest artistic representations in Britain.
In Tom’s’ work, the significance of THE OLD STONES is deeply communal, sensual, and unknowable. The rock carvings are pregnant with guesswork and invocations of thousands of years of living people, and the engraved marks are immortal imprints of their hands, their touch.
Showing non-figurative abstract lines, organic circles, and their distinctive cup-and-ring marks, they were carved by people who saw little distinction between human-made and natural-made. The unadorned stones themselves may have held supernatural significance, deposited by glaciers millennia before even the hunter-gatherers, appearing as if from nowhere on the high crest of a miles-wide trough shaped valley – what power carried them up here to these vistas, and for what purpose?
Tom’s medium format photographs, enlarged to dream-like proportions, continue to ask these questions and to celebrate these original records, the primary utterances and expressions of the earliest people, their society, their thoughts, their feelings.
