Ian McKeever: Seven Stones

Seven Stones is an exhibition of photographs taken at the Neolithic Henge Monument in Avebury, Wiltshire in the UK.  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.

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 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.