RESEARCH + COLLABORATION
The Dufton Hoarde is a living research site concerned with landscape knowledge, material knowledge and the systems used to record and care for evidence.
Some knowledge is formed through long acquaintance with land, work and material. It can be exact without being easily written down. The Hoarde places that knowledge beside maps, records, classification and museum procedure.
LANDSCAPE KNOWLEDGE
Weather, water, vegetation, paths, repair, mining traces and repeated return.
MATERIAL KNOWLEDGE
What is learned through making with rag pulp, fibre, wool, earth pigment, barytes, stone and timber.
FRAGMENTS AND EVIDENCE
Partial records, text fragments, field notes, images and absences. The gaps are not repaired.
INSTITUTION AND STEWARDSHIP
Registers, catalogues, condition reports, governance and care. The museum becomes a structure for testing what can be held.
PUBLIC ENCOUNTER
What visitors notice, remember, question or recognise when they move between the objects, Register, film and Keeper’s account. Their responses help me ask whether this heritage matters to them, and why.
T’OWD MAN
T’Owd Man knows the landscape through walking, work, weather and repeated return. Hoar frost covers him. It is part of the sculpture’s surface and part of what he reads: a condition of the ground that may reveal what lies beneath. His knowledge sits beside geological maps and mining records, but it is carried in a body that has spent time in the place.
T’Owd Man asks what the land is doing.
THE MATERIALIST
The Materialist knows through handling, making, repair and the work of keeping life going. Hessian, twine, wool and other materials are embedded within her rag-pulp body. They are part of how she is made, and part of the knowledge she holds.
Her work draws on domestic and agricultural labour, ore washing and dressing, dairying and the small economies that records often leave at the edge.
The Materialist asks what can be made, kept and carried.
PROPOSED PHD BY PRACTICE
The Dufton Hoarde is the starting point for a proposed PhD by practice. I want to develop T’Owd Man and The Materialist as central sculptural works, exploring how knowledge of ground, labour and materials can be held within their forms.
The artist-made museum gives this work a public life. Through its objects, Public Register, film and conversations with visitors, I want to explore what people recognise as cultural heritage, whose knowledge they find present or missing, and why it matters to them. I am currently seeking the right supervisory team and full funding to develop this work.