Overview

The Dufton Hoarde is a fictional museum of funerary figures, unearthed from a disused lead mine in the North Pennines. Set to open in Spring 2026 in the village of Dufton, it brings together sculpture, sound, memory objects, and community engagement to form a living archive of rural lives.

Rooted in situated fiction and contemporary sculpture, the project draws from lead mining and agrarian history, oral traditions, women’s work and landscape mythologies. It asks what remains of a life once lived - and who gets to decide what is remembered.

Concept + Aesthetic

This is not a history museum. It is an imagined archive, based on the emotional and material residues of rural labour. The sculptural works are grounded in a speculative yet believable narrative: that women in the 19th-century lead mining communities created clay figures to mark death, longing, or transformation.

Each figure carries the marks of its making - handmade, worn, patched, rubbed with pigment, embedded with fragments. Glass eyes occasionally interrupt the earthy texture, not for realism, but to imply presence and gaze. The aesthetic is quiet, austere, and uncanny, somewhere between archaeological find and devotional object.

The work balances fact and fiction, inviting belief without requiring it. At its core is a question about absence: how does a life vanish, and how might we feel its trace?

Selected Statues / Stories

Each figure in The Dufton Hoarde has its own sculptural logic and implied backstory. Some are shaped by grief, others by migration, weather, or resistance. Some figures are named - drawn from William Fleming’s 19th-century diary of life in Dufton. Others are unnamed, perhaps unnamable. Their gestures are minimal - a tight lip, the tilt of a head or a glint of ochre in the soil around the foot.

Each figure carries something of a person. But together, they represent something larger - the memory of a place, a community, a way of being.

A few examples:

• READY TO RAKE
sarah, farmer’s wife, knock, early 20th century

Sarah worked the fields with Jacob.
She raked hay, harrowed soil, pulled turnips, picked stones.
It wasn’t help. It was labour.

There were cows to milk, shirts to wash, hens to feed.
Her hands were strong. Her back was stronger.

She didn’t complain, but in still dawn moments,
She often glimpsed forbidden paths that men walked freely.

There’s a figure in the hoarde, with hay pressed into the crown
and mouth set:
as if holding something back.

• NOT SUCH A PERFECT DAY
joseph, smelter, dufton, 1873

The furnace was kindled at dawn, they kept it going past 6.
He crushed ore and shovelled rock, in thick smoke and drifting soot.
Each day.

Sometimes nine or ten fodders of lead.
But on a bad day, for Joseph there was nothing but ash and disappointment.
And when the furnace fell cold, he turned to farm work.

That mill in the pasture is humps in the ground.
And the blackfaced sheep graze within field walls now laced with stock fencing.
There’s a circular walk from the village.
With a bench on the green where you can sit to watch the world go by.


• HELD AGAINST THE HELM
North Pennine Woman

They say she stood with shoulders wide.
When the Helm came howling, she didn’t flinch.
But watched the mine wounds darken, year by year,
and honoured those who stayed.

The women who folded fields into their aprons,
and those who, like the goose-mothers,
held their children safe while measuring loss by the barrowload.

This figure stands for them all.
Kept alive through the generations,
her silage net like a shawl against the wind.

In the dark seams, now they count the wings of tissue moths.
A warning. A blessing.

These works invite interpretation, not instruction. The museum provides space for quiet looking and lingering questions.

Museum Installation

The installation is housed in an outbuilding in Dufton. Part gallery, part chapel, part mine shaft - the space is designed to feel both domestic and sacred, rooted and estranged. Sculptures are presented with minimal signage, allowing the atmosphere and materials to speak.

Audio elements - fragments of lore, the sound of a distant rockfall, then soft-spoken recollections -play on loop. A small table offers facsimiles of letters, notes, and tool lists. Light is low and warm. The boundary between exhibition and ritual is deliberately thin.

Making Process

All figures are hand-built from a hybrid pulp clay, composed of rags, barytes dust from the lead spoil, plant cellulose, and earth pigments bound with egg.. Materials are gathered from the surrounding fell: sedge, lichen, rust, and root matter. Each piece is carved, sanded, and wax-finished - often over weeks or months.

Process is central: slow, physical, repetitive. Every gesture embeds time. The labour of making echoes the labour of those remembered.

Studio practice includes daily walking, collecting fragments, and quiet documentation - a form of fieldwork that blurs the line between research and reverence.

Engagement

The Dufton Hoarde is not only a sculptural installation but a community-engaged project. Public workshops, guided walks, and storytelling sessions explore themes of memory, material, and rural heritage.

Local residents will contribute recollections, fragments, and thoughts on loss and land to shape the ongoing archive. Artists, walkers, and villagers will all be invited to reflect on what should be remembered, and how we hold space for the unseen.

Future Plans

After its opening in Dufton (Spring–Autumn 2026), the museum may tour selected galleries and heritage sites as a portable installation.

A companion film is in development - inviting audiences to slow down and listen. To feel the place behind the work, see ordinary lives held with quiet dignity and contribute to the wider mission of The Dufton Hoarde: to connect contemporary art with rural life, memory, and myth. The project will also inform The Lost Line, a follow-on sculptural programme exploring rural women’s histories through travelling residencies, object-making labs, and mobile archive structures.