Joanne Coates shares her experience of creating The Lie of the Land, her commission for Jerwood/Photoworks Awards 4.
Joanne is one of two awardees for the fourth edition of the Jerwood/Photoworks Awards, alongside Heather Agyepong. They were selected from over 370 applications to a national call for entries and have realised ambitious new works over a 12-month period for a national touring exhibition launching in London at Jerwood Space on 23 September 2022.
Joanne Coates’s The Lie of the Land is a body of work that explores the social history of the land and narrates a story of gender and class that has long been forgotten – or simply never told – in relation to the countryside of the North East of England. For this commission, she collaborated with twelve women who identify as working class, living and working in rural or agricultural settings, to develop a series of portraits that represent their individual lived experiences.
