Dawn Hurton -Contemporary Sculptor

Dawn Hurton Sculpture

I live and work in a remote corner of Cumbria, England. This place beneath the Fiend’s Fell is part of the North Pennine ore-field which has been mined for lead and silver for more than a thousand years and the remnants of working lives spent mining, farming and quarrying, are all around. My work is figurative and speaks of the contemporary, post-industrial landscape and fleeting presence of humanity.

The village is a living portrait and the skin of the rough, upland earth behind it, stretches over a dark and ancient realm which isn’t under human control; a hollowed corpse, brutally conquered by pick and tenacity, and intimately excavated for its riches can lay subliminal claim on those who enter. This wild and remote ‘depthscape’ holds a past vested now in the memory of just a few while increasingly, most remain concerned with the surface of things, the knowable.

I embed found materials, plant matter and minerals into hand-made paper pulp clay which is stained and patinated with earth pigments bound in egg tempera to connect medium with meaning. Interested in the stories not yet heard, human impact on the land and the imprint of the land on people, I wonder what resonates today, whether there is tension between mobility and rootedness and how places can become their best to sustain life for all.