Richard and Arron (R&A Collaborations) make wonderful films about British makers. This month it was my turn to become the subject of one. I’m currently very much in the early stages of developing a new series of sculpture and so the pressure of a deadline and external exposure caused more than a little panic. However, with a bit of coaxing from Arron, I came to accept that it will necessarily take time for the next stage of my work to emerge and that it’s more important at this stage to focus on the journey than the destination.
Alongside some footage of my work, I decided to take the two filmmakers on a walk from my home in Dufton to see if we could somehow capture a sense of what it is in the landscape of the Eden Valley that I find so compelling – the feeling of the past pushing up from below, people, their homes and occupations calling from time gone by, the animals grazing on the green, the natural world, the winds and floods, peacetime and Border raids.
I planned a route going out of the village towards Long Marton into Dufton Ghyll, a place where history feels very much alive, crossed by ancient routes which have been traversed over the centuries on both horseback and foot, dragging stone, minerals, and milled corn.
Enter the woods and you come upon a skeletal reminder of the barytes industry: the jig, which used water to separate the heavy barytes from other ores. In 1884, Dufton Corn Mill, in response to increased industrial demand, was converted to instead crush barytes, a heavy mineral mined on the fellside behind Dufton Pike.
Crossing the footbridge and walking against the flow of the ghyll, you enter a quarry where the best exposure of St Bees sandstone in the Eden Valley can be found. The ghyll has eroded the rock to create a gorge revealing tons of accessible building stone. The distinctive red stone towers 40 feet over head in places and supports a whole ecosystem of lichens and mosses, ferns and liverworts, and the insects, fungi, birds, deer, and red squirrels that feed upon them.
The quarrymen cleverly diverted the beck so that it didn’t flood their workings. Look up and around at the herringbone rock faces dressed in situ ready for extraction, etched with names with dates long ago left behind, and you can still almost hear their voices echoing.
Leaving the quarry and entering the village, the distinctive sandstone houses are imbued with a new meaning. Sandstone walls, monuments, wells, and graves were carved by local craftsmen who cherished the local material and perfected their craft in learning how to work it. It is this interconnectedness that I try to raise awareness about through my work. In an age where we move forever further into the virtual world, I find in such material physicality a deep and important grounding.
Landscapes are deeply layered, with geology, geography, and culture. That which goes unseen is just as important as the visible, for without the stories that lie hidden below, we see a body but not the soul.
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