During our conversation AJ Stockwell shares their belief that from an early age, ‘land can impact upon our psyche, can foster a desire or need to be with specific landforms’. This is how AJ anchors their practice: by locating themselves in a landscape and developing an intimacy with place. Specifically, with the geology of a place; rocks and minerals above and below the Earth’s surface, which are conceptually, materially and psychologically grounding.
For AJ, the move from Uist, in the Outer Hebridean Archipelago, to take up the Freelands Studio Fellowship at Duncan Jordanstone College of Art & Design (DJCAD) at the University of Dundee, was a profound un-anchoring. A deeply felt dislocation from the place in which they were grounded. It is a condition mirrored in the clay that they are working with: delivered in bags to the university, displaced from the context in which it was extracted. So whilst the fellowship was intended as an opportunity for AJ to ‘get back to’ their individual making practice, they initially questioned how to navigate the distance from Uist, as the point of origin of their research into queer ecologies, and the specific artwork that they wanted to develop through the fellowship, which had emerged from that landscape.
AJ Stockwell: Quarrying
Written by Rosie Hermon
A response to the material practice of artist AJ Stockwell during their 2025 fellowship at University of Dundee.
Away from home, the process of finding ways to re-anchor themself in this work, and in the fellowship in Dundee, has involved a turning inwards...
This artwork is a series of large clay ‘sounding vessels’ AJ has constructed as aerophones – wind instruments that produce sound through vibration – their marbled appearance evocative of boulders, mineral seams and metamorphic swirls. An exhale of the body becomes resonant sound within the body of the vessel – both sculpture and performed object. Through the production of these vessels in the art school ceramics workshop, AJ is pursuing the idea of embodied, vibrational sound and listening as a form of more-than-human communication, a way of communing with another body, a body which is unknown.
Away from home, the process of finding ways to re-anchor themself in this work, and in the fellowship in Dundee, has involved a turning inwards, disentangling the performance of these vessels from both the landscape of Uist and the ideas of ritual embedded within that place, while moving towards more intimately felt, personal relations with geologic bodies proximate to their current location.
This has been part of a journey, one that started with a whinstone boulder that sits alone outside DJCAD – the only stone that was ‘visibly available’ to AJ in the art school – a relic of the stone carving that was taught as part of sculpture up to the 1990s. In developing their connection with the site of the art school, AJ sought to understand the boulder’s journey to that place, and in doing so they came across a local whinstone quarry at Ardownie – conceivably its site of origin. Their encounter with the quarry has opened up a new seam of enquiry within AJ’s practice and a subsequent focus for their work. AJ has been asking themself: What is it to be quarried? What are the languages and processes around how a geologic body is used?
AJ considers the violence or disruption of the quarrying process. They have been reflecting upon excavation: ‘what it is to be taken apart’, what it is to have different parts of oneself exposed...
They are asking these questions as a way of reflecting on their own body and relation with site, in tandem with their developing understanding of materiality. The Ardownie quarry contains other minerals – agates, amethysts, quartz and a very iron-rich, liver-coloured clay – which are all considered waste material in the process of quarrying the whinstone. Through their conversations with the site supervisor about these different materials and what they are used for, AJ has begun to see parallels between their experience as a queer body, a neurodiverse body, and how value structures of usefulness, desire and understanding are imposed upon human and non-human bodies in different contexts. But more than this, in approaching the quarry as a geologic body in its totality, AJ considers the violence or disruption of the quarrying process. They have been reflecting upon excavation: ‘what it is to be taken apart’, what it is to have different parts of oneself exposed, and the difference between what is visible on the surface – ‘an outcrop’ – and the complexity beneath.
These ideas have been furthered through a Queer Geology workshop AJ delivered as part of an exchange with Falmouth University, facilitated through the fellowship. The speculative workshop invited others to consider their own relationships to geologic bodies, how their connection with the particular geological object they each brought along might be understood and extended, as a way of becoming other. In exploring this through movement, visualisation and automatic writing exercises, AJ was interested in the generative potential of the workshop, both in developing their own thinking around queer geology, and in its impact on those attending and their own developing relationships with geologic forms.
AJ’s connection with the quarry has also informed their engagement with DJCAD, and the students, by bringing materials from the quarry into the art school and opening dialogue with the ceramics department about the quarry’s potential as a site to gather local clays. However, working through the ceramics workshop, the principal site of their making, has been complicated by sometimes intermittent access to the space. Partly in response to the challenges the students also face in accessing this space and the kilns there, AJ extended their exploration of material use and value through a ‘Material Exhaustion’ workshop. The session’s provocation being to invite students to question the impulse to fix ceramics through the firing process, to return the material to geological time. Participants instead explored the process of working clay to the point where it almost becomes unworkable – exhausted – to then bring it back to a workable state, and to then start again. A looping of present time. Communicating through practice the tacit understanding of material limit that develops between the sculptor and the clay.
In other ways, access to the technical facilities at DJCAD has been transformational. AJ has developed sculptural pieces using 3D visualisation and photogrammetry, new processes through which to develop and fabricate work, now and in the future. These techniques have been part of bringing together the quarry, the sounding vessels and the art school context, as AJ works towards of sound body, an installation and performance in the foyer gallery of the university’s Matthew Building. One aspect of this interweaving of technical process and context is the fabrication of a low seat, resembling ‘a chunk taken out of the quarry’, in the gallery space. Another is AJ’s investigation into the unexpected sounds and performed potential of the ceramic instruments – shrieks rather than rumbles, tremors perhaps, energy being trapped and released – and the translation of vibrational communication between human and more-than-human bodies at both the quarry and university sites: ‘Listening through the whole body’.
This has been the turning point for AJ, realising how important sound is and exploring its materiality as something that is bodily and felt, like the resonance of a hum. But also locating this sonic experience as the basis for connection – the potential of a vibration to draw other things in as it emanates outwards.
Accompanying this essay is a text by poet Alycia Pirmohamed. Seeing a resonance between Alycia’s poetry and their own entangled experience of belonging/ unbelonging, AJ invited Alycia to speak with them about their relationship to place, within and beyond the fellowship.
The downloadable text is Alycia's response to that invitation.
About the artist
AJ Stockwell is a Uist-based artist. Their multi-platform practice crosses sculpture, audio, performance and installation.
Often borrowing languages from other disciplines, AJ considers our bodily connection to place through an expanded tongue. Their recent practice re-imagines the relationship between human and more-than-human elemental bodies, exploring an embodied relationship to ‘nature’ through acts of observation and the making of ceramic ‘sounding’ vessels. Their work draws on speculative folk fiction, the figure of the Cailleach and the (changing of the seasons), historical Scottish / Gaelic folk narratives and re-structuring contemporary lived experiences of place.
About the author
Rosie Hermon is Curator at Freelands Foundation.
About the programme
Launched in 2021, the Freelands Studio Fellowship takes place annually to connect six artists with partnered UK host universities. The programme aims to foster a symbiotic relationship between teaching and artistic practice to enrich both artists’ and students’ work, facilitated by the environment of the artist studio and within the specific context of an art school.