Jack West
Maggoty Paggoty
September 2025 - Online / Shot on and around Glastonbury Tor, UK.



Images / Press Release

When asked to think of an artist and their studio many people, perhaps naively, indulge in a romantic stereotype: an awkward dance with inspiration bound by protracted gestation periods and the alchemy of creation—all set within the organised chaos of ‘the studio’. In the modern city with space at a premium, any building with even a hint of dereliction, seems to have already been demolished. Reimagined as the next luxury living concept rendered into a 3D model in the developer’s iCloud account. Artists have been forced to adapt and take what comes, often finding themselves barely settled before having to relocate six months later. Through the sheer lack of choice of studio space, it has become rare for the site of creation to have any deep-rooted correlation to what’s produced within. These spaces exist as little more than containers for the artist’s thoughts and a temporary store for their materials.

The ubiquitous nature of phone cameras, in-depth online image archives, and AI have each influenced artists’ research methods in different ways. The translation of ideas into reality has become another expedient act in a life of so-called convenience, another automated task on the fast track to a post-labour future. Aside from international residency programmes or sites of historic interest, if location is only related to ease of commute and affordability, one could argue the studio is akin to a factory and the gallery the shop floor—something the demands of capitalism, the commercial art world, and big-city living have only exacerbated in recent decades.

But what happens when an artist decides to leave the big city for more space, for better value for money, and for the all-important balance? If an artist moves to the countryside, does the work develop a calmness, become more rooted in nature—and if so, does this suggest the hum of the city results in a visual or conceptual anxiety?

Jack West has been making work broadly relating to labour for over a decade. Across CGI video, sculpture and, more recently, drawing, he has—perhaps initially unknowingly— been engaging in the act of world building. This world consists of a post-human landscape that simultaneously represents a dystopian future as well as a de-evolved folksy past. Put simply: spaces which are familiar yet impossible to place, both in terms of time and location. More an ode to Russel Hoban’s Ridley Walker, than the sprawling megacities of Phillip K Dick. 

Many visual portrayals of science fiction feel inspired by cities, neon-lit metropolises, often with technology as the dominant force leaving humans to feed off scraps. Sci-Fi’s takes on the countryside is less abundant, and often leans into the occult or supernatural, fed by the open space and lack of human overseers. West’s works seem to flit between these two spaces, combining the agricultural, folk traditions, and the dense machinery and industry of cities.

In 2019 West relocated from London to a small hamlet in rural Somerset, where he set about building a home studio in his garden. Gone was the noise and the cramped, expensive London studio. It had suddenly been replaced with stillness and a spattering of neighbours. He found himself in a cottage at the foot of a hill, surrounded by miles of countryside and woodland to explore. 

J.G. Ballard famously wrote his novels from a small suburban family home on the southwestern edges of London, a space which led his imagination to run wild amidst the mundane of the everyday. Brought up against a landscape of modernism, fuelled by the promise of 1960s and 1970s technological advances and an exciting new world, these humble surroundings inspired numerous seminal works of British literature. Here in 2025 that future has been and gone, the bubble has burst against a political backdrop where hope and dreams of a better tomorrow seem harder to find. To West, observing from afar in his studio, London could be seen as that dystopian novel being written in real time.

As with much of the world, 2020 saw a slowdown and enforced localism—a chance to explore our surroundings. Whilst your narrator was stuck in Southeast London, West’s flight to rural Somerset, presented a novel slice of countryside to discover, a landscape drenched in its own mystery and lore. The hamlet is only seven miles from the town of Glastonbury, most notable for its Tor. If you take the steep path up to the hill that looms over the old collection of farm buildings that make up West’s hamlet, you find yourself on a spine-like outcrop of land known as the Polden Hills. From here you can cast an eye westward and clearly see the towering mound of limestone that makes up the famous peak, on top of which stands St Michael’s Tower, a remnant turret of a ruined church.

I visit West in his studio, as we prepare to embark on a hike up the Tor – artwork packed into a camping trolley in preparation for the early morning pilgrimage. 

From the viewpoint of the Polden Hills, it’s easy to see why Glastonbury Tor and the town that sprawls out along its western flank was called the “Isle of Avalon.” The name “Avalon” comes from tangential links to Arthurian legend—but the notion of it being surrounded by water rings true. Before the land was drained for pasture in the 18th century, the area would flood in winter months. As such, these geological outcrops would form islands that protruded out from the waters that expanded from their base in all directions.

Such a striking geological formation naturally became a place of pilgrimage, a beacon in a flooded landscape that, for millennia, has had all manner of myth and legend draped over its steep escarpments. One particular set of beliefs quite literally overlaid onto this landscape is the “Glastonbury Zodiac.”

The Tor, of course, lies at the centre of this zodiac, with the natural features of the surrounding landscape forming the outlines of various astrological animals: a lion, a fish, a bird. These features are then divided up by a wheel of ley lines that partition the landscape into twelve pie-slices of the typical Western astrological signs.

West stumbled across this zodiac, not through a desire to find some sense of divination in the landscape he’d recently moved to, but rather via one strange name marked out in a small sans-serif font on a 1:25,000 OS map—“Magotty Pagotty.” 

“I couldn’t stop thinking about the series of events or strange retellings that must have given such a unique name to a seemingly indistinct parcel of woodland?”, mused West in his studio. The few mentions he could find of it online referenced something called “The Glastonbury Zodiac.” It didn’t take long for him to find a copy in a second-hand bookshop in Glastonbury town. 

The zodiac was “discovered” in the early 20th century by the esoteric artist and writer Katherine Emma Maltwood. And she seems to be the first to put this clearly ancient name into writing, “It is still called ‘Magotty Pagotty’, or mother-god father-god, thus echoing the prayers that were whispered into the ear of this woodland monster.”

The “woodland monster” that Maltwood references is the first sign of the zodiac—Leo the Lion. And at the base of its neck sits the place West now calls home: the hamlet of Hurcot. By tracing the ‘neck’ of this creature up into the woodlands and by then walking to the tip of its nose, you link to another pathway known as the Polden Way. Following this will eventually lead you across the Polden Hills and down toward Glastonbury and the Tor itself.

“That’s the thing about a hill: they are inherently magnetic.” says West. “The presence of a mound makes itself known from all points in a landscape and, as such, people want to climb or conquer them. They are the earliest structures man has been known to make. They act as points of ritual, as totems that aim to reach closer to the heavens. They are features of refuge, and they are features of violence—armies that take control of the high ground, more often than not, win the battle at hand.”

When West set about digging the foundations for his garden studio, it wasn’t lost on him that the landscape he walked through every day was now exposed as piles of red clay, taken from the ground to make way for the concrete foundations. It was the stuff of the land around him, the same material that made up the hill above Hurcot—the head of Maltwood’s Glastonbury Lion. Another line from Maltwood’s text came to him, as he pondered on whether this devised world of her zodiac could have any influence on the physical reality as an artist working in a new studio.

“Miracles should not cease until the great lion had come, having a tail fastened with great chains.”

In the five years since building the studio, miracles seem hard to come by, with that giddy time of lockdown and the green pastures beyond it now so seemingly naïve. The world recovered from the virus, but the battle scars left by it seem to be growing ever deeper. Maltwood’s chains seem to be more prescient than ever.

The studio is simultaneously an echo of the past and a view of the future. It is diaristic in nature, a physical manifestation of labour and life spent: a collection of things, some of which hold purpose and others which could. With the advances in AI and prompt-generated graphics, West has taken a step away from his digital work of late; things that once required skill to render can now be made by a novice with a few clicks. This has focused his output towards the sculptural side of his practice and particularly on working with leftover material for larger works or found objects—using those things which could have purpose. The resulting works are concise, each unique in their making, and often humorous.

It’s impossible to say whether these works could have been made whilst living in the city, but they make sense emerging from West's new surroundings. Like much of his output, there is a timeless nature at play. It's not hard to imagine these new sculptures being the product of a blacksmith’s workshop in past times, made by the hands of previous generations who inhabited these woods. For an artist who has previously used a level of ambiguity around where the works exist, it felt fitting to journey from Magotty Pagotty with the sculptures in tow, ascending the Tor at sunrise to complete the circle. From the land, to studio, and back to the land—a ritualistic offering from where the earth meets the sky.