Sculpture trail exploring lead mining heritage in Middleton-in-Teesdale

Artist, Joseph Hillier, will be creating miniature sculptures of people from Middleton-in-Teesdale to celebrate the area’s lead mining heritage and to form a trail around the town exploring the community’s links to its past.

Joseph is an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Sculptors and has created over thirty public works. His work explores our humanity, re-making the human body in various materials, using ancient and recent advances in technology.

His public works have ranged in scale from the monumental ‘In Our Image’, a 17 metre high figurative construction in County Durham, to the miniature ‘Portrait of a Town: Spalding’, a series of fourteen vignettes in Lincolnshire. His most ambitious public work to date, ‘Messenger’, sailed into the city of Plymouth at dawn on 18 March 2019. The work depicts the fleeting action of a performer cast in 10 tonnes of bronze and, at 9 metres in width, is the largest cast bronze sculpture in the UK.

Joseph said: “I am so pleased to have been selected to create a new sculpture trail for Middleton-in-Teesdale. I have made sculptures on a grand scale for many places but this opportunity offers something very new and exciting, to make artworks so small they will have to be sought out in the walls and architecture of Middleton, like the metal deposits found by the ancestors of this town.

I aim to make small-scale portraits in bronze from local descendants of the lead miners whose work made this town. I am hoping local people will come to my talk on Saturday 28 February in Middleton-in-Teesdale to hear about the project. I will be looking for volunteers to model for me and my 3D scanner on Saturday 21 March, just for 30 minutes, to enable me make portraits in metal. These will be installed in secret locations around the town to form a hidden sculpture trail. I want to create a celebration of all the families and people who together create this unique community, grown from and embedded in this extraordinary landscape.”

Part of the Land of Lead and Silver project which is led by the North Pennines National Landscape team and funded by The National Lottery Heritage Fund, thanks to National Lottery players, and Historic England.