This is Alice Reddy. I photographed her in 2006 as part of my series By Water which explored the canals and water paths of the North Atlantic Ocean. This photograph was taken in Queen Street Mill in Burnley when Alice was 92. She worked in the mills around Darwen, Lancashire all her working life. Here she is demonstrating threading by ‘kissing the shuttle’. 

Queens Mill is the last surviving steam powered weaving mill. It’s going to close taking with it the experience of being in this environment, the hum of the 300 looms and an understanding of history through the rattle in your bones the machines make. The shared histories of Alice and the communities of Lancashire deserve and need this museum to stay open. Save Queens Mill!

YOU ARE HERE – ‘LEAVING THE CITY’ WALK

I woke up this morning, dehydrated and sore, reeling from a magical and intense night. With 18 others I walked from Broadcasting Place in Leeds north, through the city, into the suburbs and surrounding countryside, over fields, creek, river and road to the rocky outcrop of Arnscliffe Crag.

July 1st 2015 was the hottest day on record. That’s the UK’s hottest July 1st ever. It was hotter than Rome and Athens. These city names are exotic words that Northern European uses to describe spaces of shade seeking brightness, dust, icy drinks and windows wide open, not the usual Yorkshire describing of spaces.

Nevertheless, we walked out of Leeds in sweltering heat that followed us until the sun fell away behind Eccup Reservior. Warm air continued through hours of rolling, changing landscapes. The light crept away as our big ball turned, revealing a fat, orange moon that rose and rose and followed us into the fields along the River Wharfe.  The Wharfe Valley sweeps down from North Yorkshire, the weather bouncing back and forth off the hills, rolling down the valley like wild tumbling animals. On this hot night it brought lightning that lit up the sky so that we could momentarily see Almscliffe Crag in the distance. ‘How far is that? It looks far.’ ‘Oh, a few more miles I think…’

In the grounds of Harewood House black shadow deer moved through nighttime fields. Cows, horses and sheep stirred as our line of chatter and sporadic lights snaked through their nighttime worlds.

Hours and miles past, introductions made, conversations had, shared water and sandwiches, maps read, pictures taken. Connection through our shared journey, our shared desire for a shifting of perspective.

 Then today I woke up to this poem:

  Navigation

 lie back lie back and let

those waves move through you-

 you may as well be on the sea-

 look at the ceiling and recall the skies,

skies that have moved you.

 they are out there somewhere.

 sunlight melting through green leaves,

hiding places and sweet sounds

surrounding all ears.

 open dark eternal skies

so full of stars you could explode

with all that light.

 how many unknown eyes

have marveled

at this very night?

 northern light skin

whispers silent streaks.

 lightning magic skies

fireflies on summer nights.

 quiet, leaves & distant laughter.

 and finally,

feeling the ground

blind in dark with feet that know

each toe's sense & purchase.

 no more need to look down.

 Kerry Orr

 My sister, a poet who is spending Summer 2015 lying in her bed sleeping off the poison that is the remedy for a cancer, writes of her longing for immersion in summer’s essential nature. She weaves the metaphors of our communion with each other with this living, breathing Earth. Her desire to walk, to feel the ground of our spinning home is palatable (your connection isn’t severed, Kerry. You’ll soon again be lost in the glorious thick of it.)

What do we gain from getting lost? Our senses are awakened in the darkness by that which is forgotten or unexpected. Our perspective shifts, stimulated by surprise and the unfamiliar. This enables us to recognize that our navigators don’t always know where they’re going and our maps can’t always show us our path (easy to be poetic in hindsight – luckily for me the map readers continued to read the map and pointed us in the right direction).  

Sometimes we have to smell our way, to watch the sky for signs. Sometimes we can rely on the kindness of strangers (and they way they might come outside in their nightgowns to scold us for filling our water bottles from their taps only to invite us into the kitchen for refills, hug us, then show us the path we seek). Our children might show us that although they are 9 and 10 they are brave and adventurous creatures who can walk wildly into the night through 13 miles of the unknown.  

Strangers, colleagues, and friends can become a joyful group with shared purpose as our external landscape mingles with our internal one, our internal and external experiences becoming shared. Our feet and thoughts, travelling and meandering together to the top of the hill: YOU ARE HERE.

You Are Here Leaves the City

YOU ARE HERE

Let’s Get Lost! Let’s Not Get Lost!

Yesterday Boff and I reccy’d the last 10 miles of the Leaving The City walk. He’s my running partner, amongst other things, and, after over twenty years of running together, is the one who reads the map. Over those years we’ve made plans for me to learn map reading, but the truth is, he loves to look at a map and I love just looking around.

So I find myself an organizer of a night walk without knowing a little green line from a wide blue line, a green blob from a red triangle.

With the map reading left to my colleagues I decided to check out the route for myself in the hope that my memory will be of some use on the night.

Leeds is a city that is easy to leave. It quickly moves from suburban streets to farmland and more untrodden spaces before touching on the out-and-out wildness on the other side of the River Wharfe and into North Yorkshire.

Most of us seldom experience the world without electric light and we’ve become accustomed to our connection to people, time keeping, calendar and information through smartphones. We mistakenly think we know a place through familiarity but it is often this familiarity that comes between us and the spaces we inhabit. Leaving the city on foot, together in conversation and walking long distances through darkening spaces will give us a chance to know a different version of our city, ourselves and each other. Through this we might gain a different perspective on something we thought was familiar; might experience that sense of wonder that can bring great joy.  

 Leaving The City

Leaving The City is a 15 mile walk out of Leeds. The idea is to walk away from the city together at the end of the working day, to walk out. Out of the city lights, through the twilighted suburbs and into the countryside, into night, into the dark. We want to experience the night, distance, landscape and darkness as part of a group of people and also to experience the relationship of city to countryside and how this can enhance the affinity between the internal and external landscapes.

The idea comes from conversations as part of a research group at Leeds Beckett University. We call our group You Are Here and we are myself, Lynne Hibbert and Zoe Thompson.

Saturday Girl Loves Liverpool!

Saturday Girl Does Liverpool

Saturday Girl set off from Leeds to Liverpool yesterday to begin our tour. First stop - Look 15, Liverpool International Photography Festival. 

My team consists of photographer Luke Holroyd and Leeds Beckett University Graphic Art and Design soon-to-be graduates Jamie Sinclair and Mark West. Between them they have a good selection of the major Northern city accents covered: Leeds, Liverpool and Newcastle. And then there’s me, I’m from Delaware, USA.

As we drive over the Pennines, talking about the imminent hand-in date and how to keep a creative life after Uni, chatting and planning our day, I’m reminded of how this northern landscape shapes and defines the shifts in culture from valley to valley, city to city; the accents, northern lilts, all so particular, so regional. The cultures of the big northern cities, their industrial histories, weather, landscapes, routes of migration and their proximity to water are anchored and planted in their people and become endemic; as much a part of the individual as family and religion.

Is this why Liverpool people are so friendly? Because of the flows of the Mersey bringing foreigners, migration, goods, ideas, differences – and the effects of all of this on culture?

From the moment we stop the car at Liverpool One, Saturday Girl is welcomed into the city. The big burly security guard that approaches us starts off our day by finding us a place to park. Him and his team are equally helpful all day, checking if we have everything we need. This willingness to be approached, this openness to strangers, is such an important factor with this kind of work. We’re spending the day asking people to be photographed, approaching people with our strange requests for hair portraits. We have a great time. And it’s fun, rain or not. I chase a woman in curlers through Primark and drag her back to where we’re set up in the Dome to be photographed (actually she came willingly, and a good thing too, because I was lost!); 

a girl celebrating her 14th birthday by being dressed as a cat preens and poses for us, so weird and cute!

We have printed postcards and a special selection of backdrops that I’ve chosen, clay, greys and watery blues and greens; I’m not sure if the colours will work until I start photographing and realize the clay colour has a pink in it that looks so good with all of this pale freckled skin; the blue one setting off bright, playfully-coloured hair.

As the day progresses it becomes clear that there is something different about self-expression in Liverpool (maybe it’s something in the water?) compared to Leeds; that our cities determine us, we carry them in our posture, on our shoulders, and, yes, those differences can be photographed.

Saturday Girl will be back in The Dome, Chavasse Park in Liverpool One on Saturday May 9th and as part of Look 15, Liverpool International Photography Festival on May 24th and 25th.  

Come and say hello!

Here’s my portrait for the Vagenda book - lovely and inspiring people.

F= Feminist Conference

‘Women, Visibility and Playful Acts 2’ was a day of talks, performance, exhibition and making with artists, researchers and writers based or working in Leeds. The day was hosted by Leeds Beckett University research group F=, ‘an interdisciplinary research group exploring the significance of feminism in creative practice’.

 The sold out event was held in the new Art Space, City Library. Dr. Liz Stirling opened the ‘Unconference’ with a mixture of welcome speech and spectacle as she disrobed out of her power suit and into a performance with her collaborator Laura Robinson. After much gaffer and masking tape, leaves, twigs and bamboo the two tree women opened proceedings and we proceeded as we meant to go on.

Dr. Casey Orr talked us through her photographic work, portraits of women and ideas about the relationship of nature to culture starting with an image of her mother because ‘Everything starts with Mom’.

Jo Hassall excavated the multiple meanings of the hostess trolley and, with giant paper mache finger, invited us to join her in the joys of ‘picking scabs’ a performative metaphor for unearthing our autobiographies.

Dr. Kiff Bamford mixed research with performance, film, all the while whispering in French, in his talk ‘Lyotard’s Lips - Quivering as I go to speak’.

Bristow and Lloyd’s ‘Home Rules’ series of hand painted signs, were shown to be graphic, funny and poignant representations of the power relations in the home. (I want one.)

 Student films and graphic artwork filled the hall and mixed with work by cartoonist Jacky Fleming, Casey Orr, Gill Gibbon, designers Conway and Young and others. Giant paper mache high heeled shoes, lady razors and pink lego; symbols laid bare and speaking of a culture in need of a woman centered overhaul.  Cabinets of feminist archives and personal momento could be explored while listening to a specially curated radio transmission by Marion Harrison.

 The zine collections of Melanie Maddison, ‘Shape and Situate’ and ‘Colouring Outside the Lines’ showed the breath of important and influential women of Europe.

 The power suit reappeared, this time on Dr. Gill Gibbon, as she explained how she uses its invisibility to sneak into arms fairs where she draws the shocking world of the arms trade.

This was followed by a talk by community curator Jude Woods about her multilayered work and inclusive projects in the library.

Performance poet Rommi Smith prompted us to ‘remember the things of which they are forgetful’ through her work exploring archives and the hidden histories of African heritage.

She left us breathless and handed us to Helen Cross who closed the day with her funny, uncomfortable and prophetic story ‘Open Letter To Bees’.

In a closing ceremony Robinson Stirling invited the audience to make custom hats in commemoration of ‘Women of the World’ and lead everyone into Leeds Art Gallery with a whooping cry of ‘MORE WOMEN!’

Anyone still left wondering if feminism and equality had a cultural currency in Leeds, whether ideas of gender and visibility can be articulated with humour and rigour, chutzpah and panache, I urge you to seek out the work of F=. They are women of visibility and playful acts and their time has come.

First Tribe Loses Its Prince

In my first tribe I found the basic principles that I’ve lived my life by; to laugh, have fun, to put the joyous experiences of being in front of all else.

The structures and rules of growing up American could be sidestepped, could be Mississippi Half-stepped, shuffle and skip-stepped. I learned this from First Tribe.

Our non-hierarchical prince was beautiful, with long wavy locks, always smiling: he fit the bill. His soft, ripped and faded jeans fell off his skinny hips in hippie perfection. He ruled with his equally enigmatic brother Scott, talented and charmed, they gathered the fun people around them, they made the space to challenge and defy through pleasure, party and fun.

Jeff Morris was lucky.  Yes, he died. This week. At 46.  And he was too young, and I was shocked and heartbroken at this unexpected turn of events, so out of character for this blessed human. Blessed with good luck, good looks, good fortune, always a ticket in his pocket, a beer in his hand, gas in his car. He laughed always. Everything was funny. But alongside that laugh was a defiance against the expected, a decision to take what was offered and to live life’s pleasures fully, pleasures which he seemed to experience in abundance.

I only saw him a handful of times after we left our teenage years and I found Second Tribe (the artists), but he found true love early and his stubborn refusal to settle for a life of no fun seemed to pay off. I think I saw that same kid in his photos and posts, evidence of a life well lived, so much sunshine and loved ones around, with his husband Mark, happy and tanned, smiling from a vacation somewhere, everywhere it seemed.

There was a time when we were close friends. Our young worlds were intertwined, meaningful, and filled with cathartic moments in our personal evolutions as we grew as fast as our aching bones.

Thank you Jeff, for all of those shared decisions to jump into the thrilling unknown, to burn bridges, to challenge conventions, to start on paths, decided through half decisions and hunches about what would be fun, what would be a laugh. Because you were right, those were the first steps to being fully human.

Love Always, Casey    November 13, 2014

Teenaged hippies playing around in the winter woods, 1985. Stephanie Morris, Jeff Morris and Eileen Goodman, me behind the camera as always. I can remember this photoshoot...makes me so sad today to look at it and know that that beautiful boy is being buried right now.

The Story Of Me

The story I have of myself is one about how I tried lots of things when I was younger to find where I fit into school society. I tried everything. No group or team wanted me and I wasn’t talented or proficient at most things until I found art, specifically photography. I have always found it difficult to concentrate and have a lifetime of insecurity, joking around and not fitting in behind me. This is my story. In my story I don’t know anything. I don’t know French or the names of trees or how to use InDesign. This version of me hovers around like a stain, shameful, it persists out of overuse, out of habit.

Recently I was thinking about Maisy and how she is at 12 and I had a realisation that my 12 year old self wasn’t the strange searcher I had myself to be in my story but was methodically going through all of the options of identity that were available to me; in a search to become.  I tried out for cheerleading twice, the musical Oklahoma, then Joseph and the Amazing Technical Dreamcoat, 9th Grade Choir, the flag team, school council and the athletics team where I ran track very badly. Weird, I love running now.

But in my story of myself I am bumbling and, as always, not fitting in. I found photography and I have never altered my focus since, but have gotten more single minded and determined about art and ideas with age, ‘even though I know nothing’ says my story.

This learned self tells a strong story, very believable. It’s singular and powerful and is an illusion.

There is another story of me, a story that comes not through language but through a calm and clear knowing, I’m not sure how to articulate it, a knowing that isn’t always conscious. And in that story of me I am utterly sure of how to proceed and of what I should do, where I should be.

There have been such powerful moments of clarity from this knowing that I am changed because of them, defining moments.

I knew I could be with Boff because he was so singularly focused on his own work, I knew he’d love me but also leave me alone to follow my path.

Looking out onto the wild moors along the M62 from the airport on the day I arrived to live in England, I was bewildered by the weather, landscape and my choice to leave everything I knew to live here. But I had a clear understanding that this was what I was suppose to do, where I was meant to be.

The first time I went to Leeds Met in H Block the lift doors opened onto the 9th floor and I knew, this is where I should be. I knew it.

There’s a street between Johnny’s school and our house, a neat street of tidy houses and gardens that I walk through every day. I am comforted by this strip of middle England. This fascinates me because I have never wanted a life with the ordered, sleepy regularity this street symbolises to me. I feel safe here and I crave the safety, my body tells me this, through a clarity of knowing.

I am comforted by the sturdiness of my house, the wooden floors holding up all of my stuff, the glass of the Victorian windows rippling as it slowly succumbs to gravity, church bells on Thursday night and a thousand trees on a hill that will soon leave my house in morning shadow until Spring. In this busy, working and raising children, part of my life I crave safety and groundedness. I need to know my kids are safe. Because only then can I can think about the ideas I’m trying to articulate through photography and make these pictures.

In the story of me I love chaos and its binary anxiety. My bodily knowing, the intelligence I feel around me surprise me with its different story from the story of me, one with a clarity that runs through me. it is this knowing that leads me to my photographs and would lead me wisely through my days if I listened to my body instead of my brain, if I chose to follow it. 

I take the same pictures over and over. I photographed Vic with her dog Abi 20 years ago and again in September with Jess for Animality. The portrait of Abi here was taken on my Mamiya C330 and printed in my darkroom on fibre paper. It's propped up on a desk in Vic's house and I see it every time I visit her, but never look too close at it. I took this snap of it with my phone because I'm working on new pictures of women and animals and wanted to think about it. Picking it up made me realise how conflicted I feel about having changed to digital photography. I don't look too closely at it because it's a beautiful thing that's gone from my art life. 

I don't use film anymore. I don't print from negatives. I don't stand in a darkroom examining photographic prints, looking into the tones and shadows, reading the highlights. The fibre paper has buckled over the years, but I still know its qualities, the weight of it, the crack of it's surface. 

I don't want to go back to those ways of working, but I've lost something beautiful and I can hardly bear to face that loss.