About Searle 

At the age of twenty-six, artist and cathedral stonemason Beatrice Searle crossed the North Sea and walked 500 miles along a medieval pilgrim path through Southern Norway, taking with her a 40-kilogram Orcadian stone.

Fascinated with the mysterious footprint stones of Northern Europe and the ancient Greco-Roman world—stones closely associated with travelers, saints, and the inauguration of kings—she follows in their footsteps as her stone becomes a talisman, a bedrock, and an offering to those she meets along the way.

Stone Will Answer is an unusual adventure story of journeys practical, spiritual, and geological, of weight and motion, and an insight into a beguiling craft.

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Beatrice Searle traveled on foot with a coronation stone approximately 500 miles over an old pilgrimage path in Norway to Trondheim. Through her work as a restorer of old cathedrals in England, Beatrice discovered an ancient practice whose modern variations live on in art. During the coronation of a new king in Scandinavia and England, the king also had to briefly stand on a suitable coronation stone to feel the energy of this stone. For the coronation of Charles, a special stone was brought from Scotland. At the Marina Abramović exhibition in the Stedelijk Museum, there were also two stones where the public could stand in and on.

Beatrice Searle walked 550 miles with a coronation stone on a kind of wooden sled over a pilgrimage path in Norway. Modern thinkers like Rupert Sheldrake would see this journey as drawing energy from a stone. Sheldrake would even attribute consciousness to the stone because he, like in the Middle Ages, adheres to a pantheistic worldview in which things and stones are not dead and lifeless but generate consciousness and energy. Beatrice Searle aligns herself with her book Stone in a tradition and possibly in a future vision where we rethink the role of human consciousness and abandon the view that consciousness is nothing more than overactivity of the brain, a storm of neurons.