All works

Ritual Litter

Acrylic on antique prints · 2022–23 · Betts Project, London

Coloured geometric shapes painted onto antique prints of Neolithic monuments. The additions alter the relationships between stones, land and image, recasting ancient structures as contemporary ritual objects. The series explores architecture’s capacity to give landscapes new meanings and to imagine other ways of inhabiting the world.

Ritual Litter: a dolmen print with a pink circle and blue geometric additions.

Ritual Litter

Geometric additions in acrylic transform antique prints of Neolithic monuments. Coloured shapes recast the stones as contemporary ritual objects, joining an existing landscape image to a new spatial order.

Ritual Litter installation with Soft Stone beanbag

Stones, images and rituals

Ancient stone circles and dolmens give architectural form to rituals whose meanings are now uncertain. These paintings bring another set of forms into those spaces, suggesting new relationships between monuments, images and the worlds we imagine.

The series was exhibited at Betts Project in 2023 alongside Soft Stone: Swindon Stone edition, a printed beanbag that brings a standing stone into the interior as furniture.

Ritual Litter: The Great Temple & Grove of the Druids at Terdren, with coloured geometric forms painted onto an antique print.

The Great Temple & Grove of the Druids at Terdren

Ritual Litter: Stones of Stennis-Orkney, with coloured geometric forms painted onto an antique print.

Stones of Stennis-Orkney

Ritual Litter: Dolmen de Cugnac, with coloured geometric forms painted onto an antique print.

Dolmen de Cugnac

Ritual Litter: Double Cromlech, with coloured geometric forms painted onto an antique print.

Double Cromlech

Ritual Litter: Cromlech at Plas, with coloured geometric forms painted onto an antique print.

Cromlech at Plas

Ritual Litter: Druidical Circles at Stanton Drew, Near Bath, with coloured geometric forms painted onto an antique print.

Druidical Circles at Stanton Drew, Near Bath

Ritual Litter: South-East Entrance to la Roche aux Fées, with coloured geometric forms painted onto an antique print.

South-East Entrance to la Roche aux Fées

Ritual Litter: Dolmen du Hameau du Blanc, with coloured geometric forms painted onto an antique print.

Dolmen du Hameau du Blanc

Ritual Litter: Laggan Stone, with coloured geometric forms painted onto an antique print.

Laggan Stone

Ritual Litter: A Rocking Stone near Halifax, with coloured geometric forms painted onto an antique print.

A Rocking Stone near Halifax

Ritual Litter: Dolmen de Brantôme, with coloured geometric forms painted onto an antique print.

Dolmen de Brantôme

Ritual Litter: Laggan Stone Pl2, with coloured geometric forms painted onto an antique print.

Laggan Stone Pl2

Ritual Litter: Druid’s Temple Found in the Island of Jersey, with coloured geometric forms painted onto an antique print.

Druid’s Temple Found in the Island of Jersey

Ritual Litter: Druidic Remains of Brittany, with coloured geometric forms painted onto an antique print.

Druidic Remains of Brittany

Ritual Litter: Laggan Stone Pl1, with coloured geometric forms painted onto an antique print.

Laggan Stone Pl1

Ritual Litter: 34-Stones at Stanton Drew, with coloured geometric forms painted onto an antique print.

34-Stones at Stanton Drew

Ritual Litter prints installed around the Soft Stone beanbag at Betts Project.

Installation with Soft Stone, Betts Project

For exhibitions, acquisitions and commissions: [email protected].

Opening the files…

Selected works

50 works in 4 files. More to come.

About Sam Jacob

Sam Jacob makes work that explores the strange lives of familiar things. His work draws on the images, objects and fragments of history through which we construct ideas of nature, culture and ourselves.

Across drawings, objects, installations and curatorial projects, he examines how architecture and material things embody social and cultural ideas, how ‘fictions’ become ‘real’, how ideas become things, and how things become ideas.

Collage, copying and processes of reconstruction are central to this practice, which also moves between digital processes and physical materiality. These transformations and translations bring both humour and unease to questions of memory, value and meaning.

Solo exhibitions include Against Nature (2023) and Empire of Ice Cream (2019) at Betts Project, London, and Disappear Here at the RIBA Architecture Gallery (2018). His work has also been exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago, the V&A, MAK Vienna, the National Museum in Oslo, the Graham Foundation in Chicago and Secession, Vienna, and at Manifesta and the Venice and Chicago architecture biennials.

Curatorial projects include A Clockwork Jerusalem, co-curated with Wouter Vanstiphout for the British Pavilion at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale; The Lie of the Land at MK Gallery; and Pattern as Politics, with Priya Khanchandani, at the 2019 Lisbon Architecture Triennale.

Jacob is a columnist for ArtReview, writes Strangeharvest, and is the author of Make It Real: Architecture as Enactment. He is Professor and Dean of the Institute of Architecture at the University of Applied Arts Vienna (Die Angewandte), and directs Sam Jacob Studio, a collaborative architecture and design practice.

For exhibitions, gallery enquiries, acquisitions and commissions, contact [email protected].