Hettie is curator of the Hayward Gallery Touring exhibition Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood which will open at the Arnolfini in Bristol on 9 March 2024. Her book of the same title will be published globally by Thames & Hudson in summer 2024. Eileen M Hunt: Feminism vs Big Brother - Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life by Anna Funder; Julia by Sandra Newman Have you ever gazed into a stone and wondered as to the stories it stores? The powers it possesses? In her fascinating book, Lapidarium: The Secret Lives of Stones, Hettie Judah explores the hidden history of these lithic marvels, from their role in ancient cultures to their modern-day influences and uses. The Stone of Scone, our Stone of Destiny (soon to re-appear in the headlines given its supposed journey to London for King Charles’s coronation) turns out to be another piece of Old Red Sandstone after scientists had it analysed as recently as 1998. Here's the thing: I wanted to be able to come away from each chapter able to say a couple of sentences about each stone, but this book will leave you with a half–remembered sentence on someone who owned the stone in a century you probably won't remember. It's just a wholly unbalanced book. I wanted to love it – I think there should be loads of books encouraging us to reconnect with the natural world, to come away with some general knowledge about our planet and our surroundings and how it's shaped human civilisation at large. These tales do none of this. They're much too niche, poorly pulled together and not particularly interesting. As much as I liked the Rani of Kapurthala's crescent-shaped emerald, I really can't say I know anything about emeralds in general after reading this book. And that was one of my favourite chapters.

Lapidarium by Hettie Judah: 9780143137412 Lapidarium by Hettie Judah: 9780143137412

Inspired by the lapidaries of the ancient world, this book is a beautifully designed collection of true stories about sixty different stones that have influenced our shared historyIt could seem a dry book but it's quite fascinating as there's historical, geological facts and the lore for each of them. Hayward Touring have announced details including the full schedule for Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood which tours to the Arnolfini, Bristol; MAC, Birmingham; Millennium Gallery, Sheffield and DCA, Dundee during 2024 and 2025 Inspired by the lapidaries of the ancient world, Lapidarium is a collection of essays about sixty different stones that have influenced our shared history. This will allow me to finally focus on my passion project On Art and Motherhood - a book for which I have long struggled to find publishing support. The children’s version of Lapidarium: The Secret Lives of Stones will be published by Laurence King in 2025 with illustrations by the amazing Jennifer N.R. Smith

Lapidarium: The Secret Lives of Stones — Hettie Judah Lapidarium: The Secret Lives of Stones — Hettie Judah

A gem of a collection [...] a highly accessible guide delivered in a light, informative tone. Quietly authoritative, the author sustains our attention through the pithiness of her essays and the verve of her storytelling" Funder reveals how O’Shaughnessy Blair self-effacingly supported Orwell intellectually, emotionally, medically and financially ... why didn’t Orwell do the same for his wife in her equally serious time of need?’ Following the defeat of the Nazis in 1945, the idea took hold that Austria had been the first casualty of Hitler’s aggression when in 1938 it was incorporated into the Third Reich.’ Stone by stone, story by fascinating story, Lapidarium builds into a dazzling, epoch-spanning adventure through human culture, and beyond.

Speaking of diamonds, Judah explores the mythology around appropriated gems and their curse, and how Wilkie Collins was inspired by such stories to write The Moonstone. “Owners of the Tavernier Blue, later known as the Hope, have their throats ripped out by dogs, get themselves guillotined, die “of cocaine and pneumonia”. Whitby and the surrounding area also come under the spotlight as Judah follows the fortunes of the Alum trade and its importance to the British textile and fashion industries. “Forged by the landscape” An absolute feast for the senses, the book itself feels very much like a collector’s treasure hoarded wunderkammer of mythic and mysterious curiosities. It is split into six sections (Stones and Power, Sacred Stones, Stones and Stories, Stone Technology, Shapes in Stone, and Living Stones), and each section reveals a chapter devoted to unearthing an individual stone with imaginative, artful descriptions and a pretty wild, or wildly fascinating story connected to each stone. Ugaz’s case is all too familiar in Peru, where powerful groups regularly use the courts to silence journalists by fabricating criminal allegations against them.’ Whitby jet, imbued with the spirit of the Anatolian mother goddess Cybele, inspires tales of male priests who cut off their own genitalia to identify as women, 1982 excavations at Cataractonium – a third-century Roman military base on the River Swale, climate change in the Lower Jurassic period, promiscuous women simulating states of virginity, and warding off snakes.

Lapidarium: The Secret Lives of Stones by Hettie Judah Lapidarium: The Secret Lives of Stones by Hettie Judah

For too long, artists have been told that they can't have both motherhood and a successful career. In this polemical volume, critic and campaigner Hettie Judah argues that a paradigm shift is needed within the art world to take account of the needs of artist mothers (and other parents: artist fathers, parents who don't identify with the term 'mother', and parents in other sectors of the art world). David Gelber: Chancellors & Chancers - Austria Behind the Mask: Politics of a Nation since 1945 by Paul LendvaiAmongst these essays exploring how human culture has formed stone and, conversely, the roles stone has played in forming human culture, one will read of the Meat-Shaped Stone of Taiwan, a piece of banded jasper that resembles a tender piece of mouth-watering braised pork belly, There is the soap opera melodrama of Pele’s Hair, golden strands of volcanic glass, spun into hair-fine threads by volcanic gasses and blown across the landscape. And not to mention the hysterical metaphysical WTFery of angel-appointed wife swaps in the chapter of alchemist and astrologer John Dee’s smoky quartz cairngorm, as well as, the mystical modern-day TikTik moldavite craze vibing amongst those of the witchy-psychic persuasion. I cannot even tell you how many times I paused in my reading to open a new Google tab and research, thinking, “holy fake crystal skulls/malachite caskets/pyroclastic flow rap lyrics! I gotta learn more about this!” Judah has taken 60 stones, some as precious as rubies and sapphires, some as unglamorous as granite and millstone grit, sub-dividing them into six sections – stones as symbols of power, stones used in sacred ceremonies, stones that find themselves a place in great literary works, stones associated with industry and technology, stones that have been shaped, sculptured and formed either by artists or the natural world, and stones as living entity, investigating such topics as mountain and cliff erosion, volcanic activity creating new islands and changing the landscape, loss of biodiversity as coastal reefs are replaced by concrete barriers, and the disturbing understanding that our plastic debris, discarded mobile phone components, batteries and other durable ephemera are already undergoing striking transformations in the anthropocene to become the fossils of the future. This book is more people-centric than stone centric. Each essay isn't actually about a stone, it's a niche tale about people with a connection to the stone in question, and it's the people that the essay focuses on. This in itself isn't a failing, but combined with the overuse of minor historical details and dates and bulky context (which, surely could have been reduced down) it is quite difficult to sift through and actually find any vaguely interesting information. These adverts enable local businesses to get in front of their target audience – the local community. Inspired by the lapidaries of the ancient world, this audiobook is a beautiful collection of true stories about sixty different stones that have influenced our shared history