Behind The Scenes on This Epic Durham Dales Grand Designs Project
Sunderland-born artist Sarah Nelson has built a sustainable creative hub in the Durham Dales
Sarah studied theatre design in London, worked as a set designer and art director for theatre and TV, and was expat in Oman and Qatar for a decade with her family. She returned to the UK (Rye) in 2015 and became a full-time artist, and her prints, paintings and drawings have been widely exhibited. It was in lockdown that she decided to move back up North. ‘I was having regular calls with my mum and she said, “oh, I’ll believe that when I see it”,’ Sarah laughs. Sarah had spotted a field with planning permission, around six miles from Romaldkirk, for sale via auction. Her parents viewed it and Sarah visited shortly after. Following a battle with one other bidder, the three-acre plot in the Durham Dales was Sarah’s, ‘and just like that, hundreds of thousands of pounds started to be spent’.
Sarah was left with two piles of old building stones from an original building which had been demolished there in 2007. ‘There was no question that I wasn’t going to use that stone,’ she says. ‘I went to Elliott Architects [in Hexham] with a mood board of, I suppose, stone “things” and wild, field-like gardens,’ she says.
‘Sarah’s home/studio combines a studio and gallery, and has become a creative hub’
With a vision for her home/studio/gallery, Sarah decided on timber for the structure and found insulation inspiration at an event at The National Self Build & Renovation Centre in Swindon. Just as she was leaving she came across a stand displaying hemp block and batts. ‘It had a very nice feel – sort of cosy, really nice acoustics and a lovely smell.’ After listening to Dr Tom Woolley, who champions natural building, talk about hempcrete on a podcast, Sarah was sure this was the right choice.
‘The hemp grows so quickly it can be used as a catch crop. This plant gets planted in the ground (it’s from the cannabis family) but what is wanted from the hemp is the stalk,’ explains Sarah. ‘It’s hardly got any leaves on it and traditionally the outer fibrous bits were used to make rope. But the hemp for the hempcrete is the inner woody core and it’s really, really strong, and it has to be specially manufactured. It has a proper system designed to cut it all up and then it has to go through an extraction process to remove any of the fibres and any of the dust because fibres and dust absorb moisture at a very different rate. If you end up with dust and fibre in the wall that will suck all of the moisture out and you’ll end up potentially with crumbling walls.’
Sarah says the hempcrete she has chosen is ‘acoustically absolutely lovely’, and she’s most pleased with knowing that whatever carbon she’s put into the atmosphere by building the house, she has potentially neutralised. ‘It’s a totally breathable wall, so it deals with any natural moisture in the air, and it absorbs heat and then slow releases it,’ she adds. ‘So once the space is heated up, it keeps it at that temperature for quite a long period of time. I’ve only been living in it since August, but so far so good!’
All of this and more was documented recently on Channel 4’s Grand Designs. ‘It gave me a point of regular contact with people who were genuinely interested in how the project was going. My poor mum would say, “how was your day” and ultimately got very fed up about the finer points of how many cubic metres it was or how much I’d gone over budget,’ Sarah laughs. ‘I think they’re used to dealing with people in often quite fragile states! That was a major highlight actually. Obviously it was quite surreal having Kevin McCloud here because I’d watched Grand Designs for 25 years and the morning he turned up, I was like, “that’s actually Kevin!”. They were a very, very nice, supportive team, and Kevin is very knowledgeable and fundamentally really interested in architecture. He was particularly interested in the fact that this project was using hempcrete because he has built in hempcrete.
‘The brilliant thing Kevin said, which they closed the programme on, was that it’s artists that are forward thinking. There was a fantastic quote that he used: “it is to the artists that we should always be looking to show us the way forwards”.’
Throughout the build, Sarah made a drawn record of each stage of the process, and she’s now open to commissions to draw at live events, capturing what a camera can’t. During her move back to the North East, she had a temporary studio at the Middleton-in-Teesdale Auction Mart and took part in live drawing during sale days. ‘I think I’ve found a really great focus for my work because I realised that I like to draw directly from life,’ she says. ‘I like to be really in the environment. I can capture movement or get a gesture or a mark down really quickly – it’s a direct response to what I’m seeing. That’s become really central to my work, that I love drawing movement, and I suppose the focus is also a bit on performance.
‘I think I was naturally drawn (pardon the pun) to what was going on within the sale ring more than what was going on, let’s say, outside in the pen because the ring is a performance space. That’s very interesting because not only have I come back to my roots in the North, but I’m also now tapping into my training as a theatre designer. Then I can take those drawings with some photographs back to the studio and think about how they might evolve into a painting or printmaking.’
Sarah’s home/studio combines a studio and gallery, and has become a creative hub. ‘As the build went on, I thought I definitely want to develop this space into a creative hub within the rural North East and so I’ve started developing that already,’ she says. Her inaugural exhibition featured on Grand Designs. ’My intention is to try to present new exhibitions and have launch parties to celebrate them. I really want to be able to curate and host exhibitions and host arts-related workshops in the house and in the studio. I’ve done three workshops so far and in all three cases we’ve ended up using what’s become known as the “drawing room” (which is the living room), and the studio space because the views from the windows are really amazing.’ Upcoming workshops include an introduction to monoprinting on the 14th of March and Ukrainian egg dying and botanical monoprinting on the 4th of April.
The studio is a space for anyone to explore creativity. ‘So many adults I speak to enjoyed art when they were at school, but somebody (perhaps a teacher) told them that they weren’t any good, so really this is a place to encourage people to pick that up again and enjoy the process of making and being expressive with the work,’ she says. ‘From the feedback I’ve had, that’s what people have got from it. I had a very well established artist here a couple of weeks ago – Dorothy Ramsay. She’s had a bit of a sort of love-hate relationship with charcoal, and by the end of the day she really felt as though she had gained something that she could take forward into her practise. That’s brilliant. I learned a thing or two from her as well!’
Sarah’s ethos remains that art should be accessible to anybody and she’s welcoming any creatives to share their thoughts and ideas for future workshops and exhibitions. Having met a number of local artists, Sarah is now discussing how they can establish what she’s calling a Rural Art Path (RAP). ’My idea is that we try and come together collaboratively and advertise and support each other because everybody’s different,’ she says. ‘Let’s see how far we can go…’
