RESEARCH
The Dufton Counter-Archive: landscape knowledge, material knowledge and stewardship in the North Pennines
There are forms of knowledge held in landscape, labour and repeated observation that are becoming invisible because modern institutions are not designed to recognise them.
The Dufton Hoarde is a practical environment in which those forms of knowledge can be made, tested, recorded and placed in dialogue with the systems of museums and archives.
LANDSCAPE KNOWLEDGE
Looking, listening and noticing: lead traces, farming, weather, water, hoar frost, vegetation signs, paths, repair and lived familiarity with the fell.
MATERIAL KNOWLEDGE
Sculpture and making as investigation through rag pulp, barytes, earth pigment, vegetation, clay, stone, timber, fibre, wool and hair.
FRAGMENTS AND EVIDENCE
Text fragments, records, oral histories, field notes and original sources used without pretending that partial evidence can become a complete life.
INSTITUTION AND STEWARDSHIP
Museums, archives, governance, Registers and care tested as structures for holding knowledge rather than treated only as objects of critique.
T’OWD MAN
T’Owd Man is a vernacular landscape reader: a knowledge figure formed through mining, walking, weather, work and long acquaintance with place.
He reads the surface for what lies beneath it. Frost, water, grass, stone, changes in vegetation, the line of a rake and the behaviour of the ground become signs through which hidden conditions might be understood.
His knowledge is practical, repeated and anticipatory. It is formed by returning to the same places, noticing alteration and remembering how one condition relates to another. It belongs to movement through the landscape rather than to a single written method.
Within the research, T’Owd Man brings embodied landscape knowledge into contact with geological maps, mining records, archives and museum classification. He allows different systems of evidence to be compared without requiring them to agree.
Rather than a mascot, a historical reconstruction or a recovered authority; he is a sculptural proposition through which the Hoarde asks how knowledge becomes credible, who is permitted to hold it and what is lost when sustained observation is no longer recognised as a method.
T’Owd Man reads conditions, signs and relations within the landscapeto ask what the land is doing.
THE MATERIALIST
The Materialist is a developing knowledge figure concerned with what is known through substances, processes and repeated handling.
She works the land, handles ore, understands animals, reads weather, transforms materials, preserves food, mends cloth and keeps what will be needed later. Her knowledge is not abstract. It is formed through work, necessity and close familiarity with how materials behave.
Current sculptural propositions include Fire Carried, The Woman Who Drove the Plough, She Knew What to Keep, Milk Would Not Keep and The Small Means.
The work draws on need-fire, women’s agricultural labour, ore washing and dressing, dairying, domestic production, seed, cloth and small economies. It does not claim that these practices were exclusively female or that they can be recovered as simple solutions.
The Materialist asks what knowledge was required to transform, preserve, repair and carry life forward, and what becomes invisible when that knowledge is treated as ordinary.
She knows through handling, transforming, preserving and repairing the land’s materials what can be made, kept and carried from it.
FUTURE DOCTORAL RESEARCH
The Hoarde is being developed as the basis for future practice-led doctoral research.
The proposed research will use the artist-made museum as a living site through which landscape knowledge and vernacular material knowledge can be tested against institutional stewardship.
Research conversations are welcomed with artists, landscape scholars, historians, conservation practitioners, archives, museums and rural communities..