“It is through the photograph that I have come to know myself and through the painting I have come to be myself” - IM
HackelBury presents Ian McKeever: Seven Stones, an exhibition of photographs taken at the Neolithic Henge Monument in Avebury, Wiltshire.
Made in 2017 using a medium-format analogue camera and printed in 2025, these works reflect McKeever’s fascination with the physical presence of the stones; their mass and heft and the sense of time and permanence which they embody.
Seven Stones forms part of McKeever’s philosophical exploration and long-standing dialogue and symbiotic relationship between painting and photography, presence and absence, time and materiality.
“It’s the gap between an image and its presence that intrigues me”. IM
Rather than depicting the Avebury stone circle as landscape or monument, McKeever focuses on the presence of the stones: their physical mass, indomitable endurance, and radically non-human sense of time. The photographs do not attempt to encompass the site as a whole. Instead, McKeever moves close to the stones, cropping tightly, circling them and allowing their weight and density to assert themselves within the frame.
The photographs Seven Stones emerge directly from McKeever’s painting practice. Known primarily for his abstract paintings, McKeever frequently turns to photography not as a preparatory tool, but as a “reality check”: a way of affirming the world of sensation that his paintings pursue in more elusive, amorphous forms. While his paintings allow presence to remain latent and indeterminate, photography pins it down to a recognisable object. However, also recognising that a photograph as such is itself an abstraction, as is the painting. This gap between an object and an implied presence McKeever explored in his monumental painting series Henge Paintings 2017 – 2022.
The tension between the fixity and certainty of the photographic image and the open-ended temporality of painting is central to McKeever’s work. A photograph holds a single, emphatically fixed moment in time, while a painting evolves across months or years, resisting completion and refusing to belong to either a single point in time or a single viewpoint.
Ian McKeever: Seven Stones invites viewers into a quiet but profound encounter with the stones as presences rather than images, asking how we register the world physically and sensorially and how art mediates between what is seen, what is felt, and what endures across time.
