Produced as a commissioned series for Photoworks and English Heritage’s Focal Point Artist Residency Programme, 'Kingdoms of Scattered Stones' positions itself within Burgis's ongoing practice surrounding her relationship with Englishness as a British-Thai woman.
Situated within her home county of Dorset, the Neolithic site of the Kingston Russel Stone Circle becomes a representational structure for personal and cultural understandings of time, trace and belonging.
With the etymology of the stones geology potentially deriving from words for 'foreign' and 'non-christian', language became a central axis to the series. Burgis contemplates how language, text and storytelling influence the cultural identities we connect with through experimentations with scanned text from family archives and books shared within the local Thai community. Reimagining these found texts into marks and textures, Burgis attempts to draw parallels between the texts and the stones tactility. Like messages from the past, these traces ask us to contemplate our inherent relationship with land and time. Throughout the production of the series, Burgis worked closely with the Dorset-based -Thai-female community, through hosted picnics at the site, interviews and organic dialogues. This series is dedicated to those women, to the families we are born to, and those that we find.
'Kingdoms of Scattered Stones' is currently on display at Stonehenge Visitor Centre until September 2025 as part of 'Echoes: Stone Circles, Community and Heritage'