Sally Barton: Away with the Fairies
June 21st, 2023
By Rachel Kubrick @rachelkubrick
Sometimes the best London-based photographers can be found far beyond the boundaries of our bustling capital. On a crisp January day, I first encountered the work of Sally Barton in Wakefield, South Yorkshire, about two and a half hours from central London by train.
The artist was speaking on her work in the exhibition Reframing, Reclaiming, a group show of emerging female and non-binary photographers at the Art House, Wakefield to accompany the Hannah Starkey retrospective at the Hepworth Wakefield across town. Like Starkey, Sally finds inspiration in issues of gender and class, and yet her work takes on a much different flavour, going beyond photography to installation, sculpture, and even performance.
Away with the Fairies, 2022
A self-described “Yorkshire lass”, Sally’s practice is indebted to her upbringing in Sheffield, the Northern city known for its part in the Industrial Revolution and later industrial unrest, especially around iron, coal mining, and steel. Now based in London, Sally welcomed me to her Elephant and Castle studio to learn more about her past, current, and future projects.
Sally works in a large space shared with fourteen other artists through the charity Acme, but it is immediately clear which corner of the busy studio is hers. Adorned with beer mats hung up by frilly lace, Sally’s space epitomises her signature amalgamation of British male iconography and feminine, almost-camp, DIY aesthetics.
Stephen on his Grandparent’s farm in Pennsylvania, 2022
Many of the themes in Sally’s work can be pinpointed to her hometown: “Growing up in Sheffield with a lot of working class families,” she explains, “your experience of masculinity is very specific and narrow. That’s always influenced my work, not taking it too seriously.” This subversion of masculinity runs through all of her work, from idyllic photographs documenting her younger brother’s football team to images of her partner whimsically dancing around his grandfather’s farm near another steel city, Pittsburgh.
Sally’s photography is rooted in Sheffield not only through her concept or subject matter, but through the development process as well. In describing film photographs, she said, “I like to develop them back in Sheffield at this small family business. I like things in my process where there are forms of home, even in the physical influence of making the work.”
Sheffield South, 2022
Although analog photography is an essential part of her multimedia practice, she also actively looks to incorporate found photography in her work. “I have a relationship with archive material, being used to my grandparents in the newspaper or photographed,” she explains, as her grandfather was in the European Parliament and her grandmother a Labour politician at the helm of the Sheffield City Council. “There’s this personal relationship with how photography is used, how these images are archived, and how they age.”
Sally’s archive is wide-ranging – she shows me slides of everything from family photos and historical images to Tinder profile pictures. “I consider that alternative archiving,” she says, “finding photos from places where people wouldn’t expect like Tinder”.
Get the Love In, 2023
This alternative archiving has resulted in Get the Love In (2023), a collection of dating app photos including the Stone Island logo. “The brand is synonymous with British lad and football culture, men often posing ‘to get the badge in’, a performance of masculinity, class, and status. Peacocking. A mating call.” On the walls of her studio are some kitsch versions of this series in which she has added bows and ribbons to the images, once again destabilising the masculine imagery so integral to British culture and history.
Working-class men are an important subject for Sally, especially when looking back to Britain’s past. Away with the Fairies (2022), for example, features small cutout sculptures of disgruntled labourers adorned with fairy wings. Sally used archival photography of picketers and police from the miner’s strikes of the 1980s, but added wings akin to those in the famous photographs from another piece of Yorkshire history, the Cottingley Fairies hoax.
Away with the Fairies, 2022
Away with the Fairies, 2022
“The fairy wings was a play on being a later generation in Sheffield. The effects of the industrial history and Thatcherism felt ever so relevant but also so distant because I didn’t experience it. I was told these stories by people who were there like my grandparents and my parents. This idea that they almost became like fairytales to me, like stories you were told at bedtime becoming quite magical. It’s a cross between masculinity and femininity and creates a childlike lens for these quite serious subjects.”
These fairies show up frequently in her work, either installed alongside other photography (“I get a bit restless with the two-dimensional image,” she tells me) or in her photographs themselves. One image is a self-portrait, in which the artist is dancing in a sunny field, wearing her own set of fairy wings. Here she has placed the fairies around her in the grass, in a sort of homecoming for both the labourers and the artist– this viridescent scene is near the site of the 1984 Battle of Orgreave, in which picketing miners were violently confronted by police. “I feel like it’s the centre of everything I made”, Sally grimly explains, as a campaign for an official enquiry is ongoing nearly four decades later.
Away with the Fairies, 2022
Hearing Sally speak about this unrest and action, I cannot help but think of the hundreds of thousands of workers across the country staging walkouts as the cost of living skyrockets. Sally agrees, “I realise my interest in industrial history can be a stale subject. People forget how relevant it is. We talk about the strikes at the moment, and we think of the miner’s strike in the 1980s as really long ago, but it’s the same thing, different year. Workers are underpaid and exploited. It’s as relevant as ever.”
About Sally Barton
Sally Barton aims to reimagine the aesthetics of the North of England and British industrial history. She was raised in Sheffield, by a large working-class family. Her grandparents dedicated their lives to the Labour Party and trade unionist movement. Sally’s practice has been shaped by stories of industrial action and revolution that she was told as a child, stories that were told in the ashes of a strong working-class identity that was destroyed by Thatcher. Now she reframes these stories using photography, performance and installation.
Sally graduated from Chelsea College of Arts in 2021 and is based in London.