DAWN HURTON
Contemporary sculptor and artist based in Cumbria.
My practice begins with walking, making and sustained attention to place.
I work with rag pulp, plant fibre, wool, earth pigments and mineral material from the worked landscape of the North Pennines. Sculpture sits beside text, moving image, printed matter and the structures of museums and archives.
I am interested in knowledge formed through labour, repeated observation and handling. I look at what institutions can record, and what remains ordinary, local or difficult to prove.
The Dufton Hoarde is my central current work. It brings these parts together in a museum I have made and now keep.
Dawn Hurton is a contemporary artist and sculptor based in Dufton, Cumbria.
Her practice brings sculpture, text, textile and material processes, moving image and artist-led environments together to investigate landscape knowledge, material knowledge, labour, absence and the ways museums and archives determine what can be preserved.
Her central current work is The Dufton Hoarde, a site-based artwork and artist-led Museum of Rural Memory installed in part of the former Black Bull Inn. Rooted in the lead-mining landscape of the North Pennines, the Hoarde gathers hand-formed sculpture, fragment texts, Public Registers, film and institutional forms into a museum built through walking, making, reading and long acquaintance with place.
Dawn Hurton’s work is informed by extensive experience in archives, libraries, public art and cultural development. She was Outreach Officer for Cumbria Archive Service and Cultural Lead for Cumbria County Council Libraries. Major earlier projects include Beneath the Beacon and Story Giants of Eden.
She is also project originator and creative and interpretive lead for A Pick, the Pike and a Pear Tree, a £240,000 National Lottery Heritage Fund project at St Cuthbert’s Church, Dufton.
Recent support includes a Cumbria Cultural Fund award from Cumbria Community Foundation and professional mentoring with Zoe Watson at The Lowry. Dawn Hurton holds an MA in Community Arts with Distinction from the University of Cumbria.
How I Came To The Work
I grew up on the edgelands of a Leicestershire village in the 1970s. My dad ran an agricultural repair business from a workshop behind the house, beside neglected allotments. Machinery, roads, walls, fields and the loss of a family farm sat close together.
My grandad taught me to draw beneath a print of The Haywain. A geography teacher later encouraged me to read Marion Shoard’s The Theft of the Countryside and I mapped changes to twelve farms after that.
I studied law, worked as a solicitor and continued to find routes back to art. A public-art apprenticeship with sculptor Hilary Cartmel gave me practical experience in metal fabrication, casting, forging, mosaic and large-scale work with communities.
My later work in archives, libraries and cultural development brought another set of materials: records, catalogues, institutional language and lives laid out on paper.
The Dufton Hoarde draws these histories together: agricultural repair, sculpture, archives, place and the ground beneath the surface.
Why The Work Exists
I often feel out of step with the contemporary world because so much appears disconnected from place, land, labour and the knowledge held in ordinary lives.
The Hoarde is a place for attention.
It holds the purpose of a sheep smoot, the anxiety of the need-fire, the relationship between lead and hoar frost, the work that went unnamed, and the materials that kept passing through my hands.
I do not want to restore a complete past.
I want to make the gaps visible and give the looking somewhere to gather.
CURRENT WORK
THE DUFTON HOARDE
The central current work: a permanent site of sculpture, text, moving image, material research and artist-led institutional form.
A PICK, THE PIKE AND A PEAR TREE
A long-term church, heritage and community project connecting geology, lead mining, farming, land and stewardship. Dawn is project originator and creative and interpretive lead.