Alex Murdin

Dr Alex Murdin is an artist who has been interested in rural culture and environmental politics throughout his career. To explore these themes further he set up the collaborative group ruralrecreation.org.uk in 2007, which has been commissioned for a number of public art projects across the UK, bringing together artists, makers, scientists, landscape designers, ecologists, architects and others with different communities of place and interest.

During lockdown in 2020 he decided to go back to the bedrock of our environment and focus on stone, particularly the geology of Dartmoor where he lives, asking himself how to empathise with granite and collaborate with the rocks and the ecologies and cultures they create. His website, lithicality.space, shows this body of recent work and ideas, including the book Rock Idols: A Guide to Dartmoor in 28 Tors, written with his wife, writer Sophie Pierce, and published in 2025.

Books on this site

• Rock Idols: A Guide to Dartmoor in 28 Tors (2025)