Jerwood/Photoworks Awards | Writer – Nathalie Olah
If there has been a recent revival of interest in the British countryside, a demand for new nature writing and a bucolic fixation with cottagecore—the name given to a trend for maidenly fashions and shabby chic interiors—perhaps inevitable in an age of climate change and a faltering modernity, then rarely has it been concerned with questions about the working people who live there. Like romanticism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a fixation with the health-giving and spiritual riches of the natural world is often produced by those at a remove from the reality of having to rely on the land for survival.
This selective history is what underscores the very notion of a British countryside, and the work of photographer Joanne Coates goes further than most to challenge our belief in such a place. Here, in a collection entitled The Lie of the Land, portraits and sweeping landscapes coalesce to communicate a message of defiance, as both refuse to play backdrop to the fantasies of an outside projection, being positioned instead as masters of their domain. With an emphasis on working women in Yorkshire, where Coates was born and has spent much of her life, the series creates an alternative cartography to the one made by settlers in jodhpurs and gilets: a landscape whose flecked sunlight and complex of freestone partitions is repeated in the knotted tendrils of saplings protected under plastic sheeting, of the thick mass of a cow’s hide or the matted web of lamb’s wool, whose untangling is the work of careful and accomplished hands.
These belong to people such as Krystal—ex-army, now running various community initiatives including a popular café; Amber—mum, pageant winner and disability activist; Hellie—milker, farm worker and beater; and Lynn—ex-pharmacy worker, miner’s wife and community activist. The lists here are incomplete and hardly paint an accurate picture of the women who must assume various other roles throughout the day and from time to time in order to make ends meet.
These and the many other women featured in the series support British agriculture while simultaneously upholding a fantasy of the British countryside that is so foundational to the travel industry. They are required to contend with the dualling realities of farming and tourism, their income often propped up by cleaning jobs and maintaining the vast number of properties used exclusively as Airbnb rentals and second homes. Bed sheets wrapped tight as bandages, folded towels and fatted cushions, a polished table on top of which sits the white slab of an opened guest book, smooth porcelain bathroom fixtures and lozenge soaps, rooms alive with the smell of a synthetic meadow more commensurate to a meadow now than the peat or mildew of the past, tessellated spoons, ordinance survey maps with walking routes articulated in green biro: these are the expectations of travellers to Joanne Coates’ North East of England, and the sterile erasure that they insist upon is exactly what her work pushes so vehemently against.
Just as the inconveniences of rural hardship are often erased from the public gaze, so the eradication of any prior sign of life is demanded in the holiday contract, which holds that a clean slate be provided to each guest for the purposes of projecting a new set of memories—that most precious of commodities, pursued consciously as an emblem of a life well lived, but whose imperative might just negate the basis by which memories are formed, such as enjoyment, presence of mind, the spontaneity of being. The holiday let is only a holiday let providing it fulfil the delusion that each holidaymaker is the first and last to have ever set foot inside. The countryside often amounts in real terms to four days spent at sites of unnatural cleanliness, to further emphasise the wild and unruly beauty of a world without. It is a dynamic by which the women featured here have been historically reduced variously to bit-parts or fluffers—small figures glimpsed on the horizon and bolstering a quaint view of country life, or not seen at all, having fulfilled their duty in preparing the stage for the main character phenomenon that defines modern consumption habits.
Coates work challenges such a worldview. Against a slew of images supplied to us every day by affluent people living their best life in places they have no prior connection to or understanding of, it inverts expectations of who and what will be counted. It drives home the shame of a London-centric national media, and the somewhat blunt tools of social and economic analysis that often fail to account for those assembling an income from various casual jobs outside of urban centres. It makes a troubling phenomenon of that word ‘marginalised’, which can and does lead to the misapprehension that those contending with financial hardship exist somehow on the periphery of society, rather than being central to the British economy (and the fantasy by which that economy’s recent emphasis on experience relies); or which transforms inequality into a phenomenon of otherness, drawn along lines of identity and culture.
But above all else, and in a stroke of genius capable only of someone with a profound understanding of the formal conditions by which the photographic image has evolved, and the portrait image in particular, it creates a whole new set of main characters whose arrival here in the charmed world of the London gallery space, constitutes an intervention of the most haunting and mesmerising kind.
Daughters of the Soil - Ben Myers
Joanne Coates is one of the best photographers working today. I say this not from a particular position of expertise or authority, but only because I feel her work. Sometimes I can smell and taste it too: the stringent muck spread in the fields, the sharp tang of sea salt on the tongue. The mist rising from the moor after a violent rain shower.
She has that rare ability to capture landscapes and people – and the working relationship between the two – equally well. She’s also a natural storyteller who makes it look easy. But as any photographer, writer or artist would tell you, none of this comes easily at all, and in fact the finished work is only ever the tip of the iceberg, with the true toil taking place unseen. It’s there in the early pre-dawn starts, the mud beneath the fingernails, the long and sometimes lonely journeys across entire days when not much happens at all. I don’t remember when I first discovered Jo’s work, only that it feels like it has always been there. One of her other great talents is being able to straddle eras, for in her photographs old and new worlds collide. Her work exploring those traditional industries such as farming and fishing that have shaped the Britain of today show the conflict that arises when facing survival in a rapidly-changing (though not always improving) world. These are stories of toil and sometimes trauma; grand narratives about small but remarkable lives. And whether she is photographing female wrestlers or NHS workers, they are political too, with Jo’s images sitting in that space where various conflicts – economic, sociological, financial – exist.
In Daughters of the Soil she trains her lens on an area that still remains one of the great under-explored secrets of Britain – Northumberland – and on an equally under- explored aspect of rural life: that of the women who inhabit the landscape. This is border country, the old world, the last stop before Scotland. Historically it was land that was fought over for centuries: by warring indigenous clans, tribal warlords, Vikings, Romans and early Christians – and today by those farmers fighting for survival in the face of all manner of challenges. Borders and boundaries changed and shifted, and the country still feels like the outpost of England. A special place, with its own voice, which far away from metropolitan life often goes unheard. Jo is no tourist either: she lives in a remote dale in North Yorkshire farming country, and has spent years exploring the most marginalised corner of a marginalised occupation: female farmers. The result is a valuable social and historic work that awaits you now: Daughters of the Soil. To achieve this she relocated to Northumberland with her trusty dog Glen in tow. She lived, worked and breathed the county. She explored its fields and its back roads, and tapped into its essence. A good photographer takes good photographs but a great photographer has to be inquisitive, resilient, weatherproof and, perhaps most importantly, able to ingratiate themselves into extraordinary situations. Sometimes they have to be invisible. They have to merge with the landscape; they must know when to speak up and when to be silent.
That’s why I know Joanne Coates is a great photographer, whose work follows in the lineage of documentarians such as Don McCullin, Chris Killip and Tish Murtha. Perhaps it truly takes a working-class female to understand working-class females. Because such authenticity and vision cannot be faked.
Earth Works Greg Thomas
The presence of another person does not detract from, but enhances, the silence, if the
other is the right sort of hill companion. The perfect hill companion is the one whose identity
is for the time being merged in that of the mountains, as you feel your own to be.…To ‘make
conversation,’ however, is ruinous, to speak may be superfluous.
Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain.
Joanne Coates is from a rural working-class family, her other occupation as a farm worker in a
remote North-Yorkshire dale (as she notes in a text accompanying this exhibition, “farmer’s wife” is
one of the only jobs “where a person is defined by what their partner does.”) This biographical
context perhaps gave her a point of emotional access to the project documented by these images,
but that shouldn’t distract us from acknowledging the selfless elevation of subject-matter that
defines Daughters of the Soil, just as it defines all of Coates’s work.
It must be a gift to be photographed by Joanne Coates, a documentarist in the northern-English
tradition of Chris Killip and Tish Murtha, but with her lens trained on the rural scene. Her projects
are always accompanied by deep research and by an ethical commitment to living and breathing the
communities she photographs that reflects a strong political animus. She speaks with her subjects
over weeks and months, takes them to locations that are personally significant for them, and
captures them in situations where they – and their loved ones – appear seamlessly integrated with
place.
That this sense of imbrication with the landscape is never laden with sentimentality is testament to
the stories that Coates seeks out. The artist is drawn to those pockets of communal life,
geographically and often socially marginalised, where working patterns that have sustained families
for generations run up against the economic and ecological realities of the early 21st century. From
Orcadian fishing communities to women in agriculture in Northumberland – the subject of the
current exhibition – Coates makes her home in human-animated landscapes where the drama of
individual biography plays out against wider socio-economic paradigms that define our time:
globalised markets and shrinking profit margins; lack of access to land (or water); the insidious pull
of nativist politics; the need to sustain habitats shared with the non-human at a point of
unprecedented ecological crisis.
The camera comes laden with symbolism, but it is sometimes more able than language to tell a story
without lapsing into polemic. Ellie, pregnant with her second child, checks on the herd of wild cattle
that she wardens. Fransje removes sticks and straw from a haul of fleeces. Kirstie and her husband
prepare rams for the Lockerbie tup market. It’s all rooted in meticulous study, from Coates’s work
with Professor Sally Shortall, an expert on gender and agriculture based at Newcastle University, to
her engagement with the tradition, unique to the Northumberland region, of bondagers: itinerant
women labourers noted for their extravagant dress. But Coates does not tell us what to think about
the women she represents. We are simply invited to pay close attention to the sociologically
embedded details of their lives, and to treat them with the same respect that the artist’s lens has
afforded them.
The politics of Coates’s work therefore precedes and extends beyond tribalism, securing its
connection to the humanist photographic tradition while complementing its other art-historical
allusions: the soft, pictorialist sheen of plants behind a polytunnel, the hints of the sublime and the
picturesque in shots of the vast landscape, speckled with sheep, scored with dry-stone walls. There
is much to pore over, much to savour, and much to learn from these daughters of the soil.
An essay by my mum, Mrs Coates 2023. A collaboration looking into artist texts.
My soft non conformist Daughter
Being asked to write about Jo is hard. To me she is my daughter and I don’t know how to write, or anything about art. At least I didn’t think I did. Jo uses photography as both an art medium and narrative to highlight how everyday people make a meaningful contribution to society. My first memory of Jo 'reading' was as a 6-month old when she would hold a book upside down chattering in baby talk as though reading it aloud. Reading fluently from the age of 6, she devoured all things written and I could see how this shaped her way of being, I look back and see that early reading as a lens through which her future was shaped. The artistic streak was present and a way of doing things slightly unconventionally. I didn't know what medium but I knew she would tell stories. Ever since she was first able to put pen to paper and draw, then write creatively, then use photography to show stories! From throwing parties where she made galleries at 15. Leaving home at a young age and studying art when I was worried that wasn’t for people like us. I tried to tell her to get a job doing something else. Jo doesn’t really listen to things she doesn’t want to do. I’m glad she didn’t. She always knew and knows what she needs to do. Jo doesn’t like any overly or outwardly or over the top shows of affection which can be hard. It took her so many years to teach her family that yes she has a job and it is valid.
I often call Jo a photographer but I find it hard to tell people what she does, it can be anything but stories and working with people is how I think of it.
I hope you embrace Jo’s stories and understand the purpose behind her work. Once you do there is no going back.