Labour / Leisure

An exploration of the cultures that emerge in working-class towns across Northern England. These works interrogate gathering through the lens of crowd theory — the ownership of public space, the manifestation and ownership of culture, and the tension between state power and mass resistance through sport and leisure.

Holman’s research connects seemingly unrelated watershed moments in British history, in which ordinary people initiated behaviours that would become cultural norms: the industrious workspaces of the 1880s packed with cotton mill weavers, the swaying crowds of the North’s football terraces established by those same weavers a century later, and the illegal raves of the 1980s, as people reclaimed the spaces cotton had abandoned.

The imagery in the textile works is reconfigured and reconstructed from original police surveillance stills. That now-normalised monitoring was still a fairly new practice in the 1980s: raves and terraces were photographed both to record activity and familiar faces in the crowd, and to evidence the police’s own procedural compliance.