Short film about moving the 4th Migrating Stone on Iona. Film created by Fiona Evans. Original music by Andy Thornton and Suzanne Butler.
The Migration Habits of Stones – History of the Project
This project began in 2001 with a dream, where my recently deceased grandmother told me to go and climb Cader Idris, a mountain in North Wales. I am not a climber, and nor was I used to doing what my dreams told me to do, but my grandmother’s voice wouldn’t go away and so I hired a car, threw in a tent and walking boots and set off. As I climbed the slopes of the mountain, I came across a large stone that looked out of place. A man happened by and said he was a geologist and that what I was looking at was an erratic, a stone that had travelled in a glacier. I was amazed by this. Everything in my culture told me that rocks were solid and fixed, that something written in stone couldn’t change.
Suddenly, the world was more fluid than I’d imagined. Rocks moved. They migrated. They crossed borders and boundaries, they were the original travellers.
I applied for funding from the Arts Council to explore this and, to my surprise, was awarded a major individual artist’s grant. This enabled me to begin researching how stones move – whether that’s a human picking up a pebble and taking it home, an otter tucking a stone under its arm, freight, ballast or chunks of rock that have travelled in glaciers.
I worked with a letter carver to create the first piece of public art, which is a large hunk of slate with the words And stones moved silently across the world carved into it. This stone is sited in Leigh Woods, Bristol. I asked the wardens of the wood to offer the stone a home, to give it shelter. They agreed to this, and the stone was welcomed at a public event where people brought along music, gifts and poetry.
This work is political as well as artistic. It asks questions about migration, welcome, hospitality. Much of my thinking is based upon what I learned when I was a housekeeper on Iona, when every Saturday night I’d repeat ‘Often, often, often goes Christ in the stranger’s guise’.
The stone on Iona is the fourth migrating stone that I have made in collaboration with Alec Peever. In 2016, after taking it to be in residence at the Trinity Laban Dance centre in London during international student week (they’d been using my research in their choreography), I brought the stone to Iona on public transport with the help of two friends, Fiona Hamilton and Mercedes Nunez. The stone was too heavy for me to lift on my own so I needed help every step of the way.
On the way to Iona, between trains in Glasgow, Fiona and I took the stone (which was in a box on a sack truck) to George Square. I wanted to go there as I’d marched there many years previously against the poll tax. Fiona asked a passer-by to take a photo of us with the stone in front of one of the lions. The man she asked enquired as to what we were doing. I told him about the work and he listened intently before walking away. Minutes later he returned. He told us he was a refugee from Iran. He had been imprisoned and tortured. He had no fingernails. He had not spoken to anyone about this. His best friend in Iran was a sculptor, also imprisoned. I asked if he’d like to see the stone. He said yes and so I unpacked it. The stranger knelt down, put his hands on the stone and wept.
We arrived on Iona during peace and justice week. Helen Steven was there and attended the ritual we made when the stone was settled into it’s home in a grassy bank by the shop.We also took it into the Abbey and talked to guests about the stone’s journey and the art project.
A couple of years ago I attended a retreat with Ruth Harvey on Iona. I went looking for the stone and couldn’t find it. It was at this point that I realised grass had grown over the stone and it had completely disappeared. With a friend’s help, we revealed the stone again and cleaned it, but it was clear that we needed to move it to a better home.
In October 2025, I returned to Iona with my dear friend, Fiona Evans to move the stone to a better place. In consultation with the gardener, David, we agreed that it could be placed in a low wall in the herb garden, facing the Abbey. The stone was blessed with water from the well, drawn up by Gordie, and moved around in a wheelbarrow with the help of Andy Evans. It sat in the Abbey overnight, in front of the altar, and I led a ritual with the stone to contemplate what it means to migrate and to offer welcome to one another. Everyone was invited and many people came along. It was incredibly moving to see people step forward and place their hands on the stone. The next day we took it outdoors and had another ritual. Fiona wrote a blessing for the stone and as she was reading it we heard people cheering behind us on Tor Ab. They had just become engaged to one another – we invited them to come and join us and so together we celebrated under the blue Iona skies and swift moving spirits of place.