Throughout the summer of 2025, the Dry Stone Walling Association will host 12 competitions to see which builders can erect the best dry stone wall. Wallers will travel from all over the country and be awarded points based on each of the events they enter, with the winner of the Grand Prix being crowned the best waller in the United Kingdom.
These competitions serve several functions beyond just bestowing bragging rights to the winner: they foster the cross-generational flow of material knowledge difficult to transmit via mere writing while also serving as a form of community building. The competition format itself is furthermore inherently cooperative: while all wallers are theoretically out for themselves, they are ultimately working on individual sections of a continuous wall. This forces them to work together at the seam lines and encourages teamwork (despite the odd bit of trickery).
Having been to one of these events, I was fascinated by the competition as a window on to this ancient type of handicraft. The format is a complicated one, full of contradictions and loopholes, that reveals a niche culture with a long history. The specific choices that wallers make in constructing their walls betray an incredibly rich personal philosophy, forged not through treatises or manifestos, but through hundreds of hours of hard physical labor, a practice often at odds with modernity. The slight variations in the way different wallers go about their trade is key to understanding how they view their role: from the orientation in which they place their capstones to the choice of tools they use, each specific choice represents a world view.
I would like to attend more of these competitions, perhaps across multiple years, and make work that reflects on the material realities of walling, marrying that interest with more general musings on the place of this type of craft in contemporary British culture. This project would represent a major step in the scale and scope of my current practice, expanding it beyond self-contained sculpture to a full-on working dialogue with a broader community, one with a fascinating culture and incredible work ethic.
My recent work has focused on the traditional British craft of dry stone walling. These walls are an integral part of the landscape in this country and have deep historic roots that touch on many of the core aspects of British culture. I have a deep respect for the tradesmen that keep this tradition alive, and hope to pay them respect by honoring the material knowledge and skill that goes into their work. It is my hope that my work will bring together craftspeople and a wider art audience, allowing cross-cultural dialogue in the form of material conversations around the practice of walling. The impressive amount of specific choices that go into constructing a well-made wall of this variety reveal a deep philosophical relationship to the land, its people, and modernity as a whole. By investigating the granular specifics of this practice we can better understand the portraits of those men and women who choose to erect dry stone walls not only in this century, but in centuries prior.
My practice revolves around the concept of delineation: how we attempt to define objects, spaces, or ideas through material boundaries. Often, borders that seem impermeable are actually designed to be porous, and the hardest of shells can be quite brittle. These instances result in critical failures to differentiate an object from its surroundings, revealing to us that our ideas of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ are nothing more than projections that don’t come to bear in the external world.
Architecture provides a ready-made discipline centered around defining an interior space. As such I often work with architectural elements in order to explore how seemingly self-explanatory things like walls or scaffolding function as a synecdoche for an entire system, one typically complete with a bizarre inner logic. I’m interested in expanding on those moments of absurdity common in everyday architecture, isolating them from their functional context in order to present gestures of pointlessness. If a wall no longer serves its purpose, be that to define a tract of farmland, keep intruders out, or act as a symbolic demarcation of a country’s border, can we still rightly refer to it as a wall? Or does it cease to hold that title and become something else, some vestige of a forgotten ritual, some abstract sculpture valuable only for its aesthetic qualities?
In recent months I’ve been interested in the specific relationship that London has to its buildings: I’ve been researching facade restoration ordinances, scaffolding wrap protocols, and the local responses that happen when contractors approach a problem in unorthodox ways. These interests tie directly into my interest in dry stone walling, which is the focus of this application. As one of the oldest forms of boundary-making still abundantly visible in this country, these walls and the culture surrounding them provide a perfect window into how the people who built them thought about land, access, and history. I aim to make work that addresses these issues and exhibit in both in London, where I currently live, and New York City, where I am originally from. In recent years I have participated in group shows in Brooklyn, including shows at Black Brick Projects and the pop-up Impkin gallery.
I graduated from Princeton University in America in 2019 with honors, having majored in philosophy and minored in visual arts. I am currently enrolled as a graduate student in Goldsmiths MFA program.
In 2021 I won the Redivider Magazine’s open call Blurred Genre poetry contest for a visual poem I made using stamps.
Since enrolling in Goldsmiths, I have become the principle organizer for our Studio Sessions, an independently organized open critique group open to members of the Goldsmiths community and beyond.
In the summer of 2021 I was selected by a jury for the ChaShaMa residency program, called ChaNorth in upstate New York, for the month of June.
Email: hcooke2015@gmail.com
Address: 71 Billington Road, London, SE145QH, GB
Local Authority: London Borough of Lewisham
