Stephen Hurrel Tyne and Wear, United Kingdom
I make work in response to natural and material culture, drawing out narratives of people and place to create work in video, text, sound, photography, digital-media and context-based public art. I'm interested in the process of making, histories of materials, and the impact of analogue and digital media on our shared contemporary culture and our social and political history.
Recent work has been a response to my coastal environment in north east of England, which builds on previous video and digital work that focused on coastal communities in Scotland, Mexico, Sri Lanka, Sweden and The Azores. This interest in coastal environments is inspired by my upbringing in a small town on the west coast of Scotland that has a complex interplay of marine activity including tourism, leisure activities, ecological research, and industries that feature oil rigs, cruise ships, sailing boats and fishing boats as well as the familiar site of UK and US submarines and warships. My personal experience of this mixed-use marine environment, and the conflicting interests that it displays, informs my way of perceiving landscape as a multi-layered site with a shifting cultural, technological and natural ecology.
I've exhibited widely including the Venice Biennale, Colombo Biennale Sri Lanka, Tramway, CCA and Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow, Museum of Science and Industry Manchester, Soundwave San Francisco, contemporary art venues and film festivals in Europe, Australia and New Zealand, and have produced permanent public artworks in the UK, Ireland and Tasmania, Australia. I studied Fine Art (Sculpture & Photography) at Glasgow School of Art to postgraduate level and I've worked as a Lecturer at GSA (Sculpture, Environmental Art and Printmaking Departments) and Edinburgh College of Art (Art Space Nature MA, and Intermedia Dept) and Visiting Artist at art institutes in Norway, Sweden, Australia, Germany and Lapland. I was Course Leader of Context and Media MA at Valand School of Art, Gothenburg for two years.
I’ve been a commissioned artist and Lead Artist on public art projects which have involved extensive engagement with people and place, most recently with PlaceCreate where we developed creative community mapping projects and workshops in printmaking and animation to engage with the community of Blyth. I was responsible for the development and production of a Public Art Strategies and Masterplan for Blyth. As Lead Artist/Curator/Planner for Greenock Health and Care Centre (2016-2021) I commissioned several artists to produce new site-specific permanent artworks and I produced several of my own artworks using photography, wall paintings, found objects and text-based interventions. All of the commissioned artworks tapped into the cultural and natural environments of the area and sought to create new relationships and narratives by incorporating local knowledge, objects, materials and stories. This project received a national 'Building Better Healthcare Award 2022: Best Collaborative Arts Project'. Between 2012-2016 I collaborated with marine social ecologist Dr Ruth Brennan, as Hurrel-Brennan art-science team, producing a publication, several film productions and an online cultural map of the sea. Exhibitions included a video-based installation at GOMA (Gallery of Modern Art) Glasgow and many screenings at film festivals, art spaces, community events and marine science conferences. I am currently developing a new video installation based around footage I recorded from webcams of empty public spaces during lockdown. I'm also developing new work and collating existing work for a 2026 solo show that will focus on my use of text as an important aspect of my practice.
