The Vasseur Baltic Artists’ Award – Joanne Coates: Middle of Somewhere at Baltic
Maja Lorkowska, Exhibitions Editor
The Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art presents Joanne Coates, winner of the Vasseur Artist Award, with her brand new show Middle of Somewhere.
Coates describes herself as a working class artist who uses photography with an emphasis on the mention of class – it’s a topic that recurs throughout her practice over the years. She works in rural areas across the North East, photographing landscapes, people and scenes from their everyday lives. She explores hidden histories, struggles and reveals the inequalities in lower income communities, predominantly through photography but also with the use of installations and sound. Stories of people and the land they work on are intertwined and expertly captured by Coates’ photographic lens.
The artist is keen to work together with communities and often focuses on women too, with gender being another ongoing thread throughout her oeuvre. For the project The Lie of the Land, she worked with 12 women identifying as working-class to create an exhibition of portraits. The resulting images revealed snippets of their individual experiences as women working in rural settings in various roles. Similarly, in Daughters of the Soil, she focused on the role of women in agriculture in Northumberland and the Scottish Borders.
For Middle of Somewhere, Coates’ research led her to themes explored in previous projects, while delving deeper into disparities of wealth but also climate change and its effect on rural communities, as well as the omnipresent cost of living crisis. The artist closely collaborates with the project participants, going beyond the traditional model-artist relationship to facilitate a more even working partnership and explore the parallels between people and places in depth.
Despite the serious themes, the photographs are beautifully tender depictions of people in their own surroundings, as well as places that really shape modern countryside, and scenes from everyday life captured with the eye of someone who intimately understands the rural context.
The Vasseur Baltic Artists’ Award, is titled in memory of the late Isabel Vasseur, an inspiring curator who fought fearlessly to put art in the public realm. Through the Award, Vasseur continues to support the artists of today.
