My work is rooted in the rough, remote terrain of the North Pennines - a landscape often cast as wild or empty, but long shaped by lead mining and subsistence farming. The histories that persist here are fractured, partial, and often masculine. I work against that grain.

My practice examines memory, material, and emotional residue. Through sculpture, I explore the lives of working people, especially women, who moved within the constraints
of this harsh landscape - shaping and being shaped by it. Their stories are largely unrecorded, but remain inscribed in the soil, the walls, the silence. I seek them out, not to memorialise, but to reimagine: to create forms that provoke questions about presence, erasure, and the thresholds between past and present.

My figures emerge from a hybrid material - handmade pulp clay mixed with barium sulphate (a by-product of lead mining), plant cellulose, and recycled fibre. Embedded with natural and found materials, they are carved, sanded, and pigmented with earth minerals before being waxed and finished. Sometimes they contain glass eyes — not for realism, but to mark the echo of someone once fully present. They are not historical reconstructions. They are contemporary portraits of loss, persistence, and place.

I walk the fell daily, gathering soil, stories, and fragments. The work is part excavation, part offering. The Dufton Hoarde is my current project - a museum of fictional funerary sculptures unearthed from an abandoned lead mine and reassembled to form a living archive of rural lives. Informed by oral history, landscape, and myth, it brings together sculpture, sound, memory objects, and community engagement. At its heart is the question: how do we carry the weight of what came before - and who gets to decide what remains?

My background in rural life, environmental thought, and displaced belonging informs the quiet resistance at the centre of this practice. This is not nostalgia. It is an enquiry into how the land holds memory - and how we might too.

I am the Keeper - the one who stays with what was left behind.