‘Ghost Mills’ (2019)

‘Ghost Mills’
Group exhibition by Walking the Land artists collective (part of Stroud’s 2019 Wool and Water Festival)
SVA Gallery, Stroud
Autumn 2019
The exhibition united responses by several artists in ‘the search for lost time’, examining the links between the mills, textiles, agriculture, geography, power and wealth in Stroud’s valleys.
My personal response consisted of a two-step approach. I firstly engaged with historical textile mills in the Macclesfield area: I visited their locations, made drawings, photographed the buildings and, where possible, talked to current users. One mill in Macclesfield is now a gym and I was allowed a tour round the building, gaining access to the ‘strong room’ where gym members lift weights. I was told that there is a ghost in the mill… When I visited Adelphi Mill in Bollington, I decided to connect with the building in a very physical way by running up and down its stairs for a continuation of and hour and a half in oder to feel the physical aspect of strain and exhaustion in connection to the building and its stairwell section. I wanted to connect to the embodied ways of the work-life of historical mill workers. I then produced several small handheld image cards that showed visual features of the Macclesfield area’s mills and I took them with me on my visit of the Stroud historical area. As part of the second stage of my artmaking response, I jogged along a canal in Stroud which connected several historical textiles mills. I added notes and drawings to my hand-held image cards and later exhibited all of the materials as a wall-hung assembly of all artefacts.