Joanne Coates: The Lie of the Land, class in the rural North East

The Lie of the Land

The Lie of the Land explores the social history of land, and narrates a story of gender and class that has either been forgotten or never told. Over twelve months Coates collaborated with twelve women who identify as working class or low income and live in rural areas of the North East of England. Through conversations, walks, photography and written reflection, the work produced images free of the romanticism that usually attaches to contemporary rural England, bringing together photography, sound, sculpture and writing to address the erasure of working-class histories and culture from the British countryside.

Coates works inside the communities the project concerns rather than visiting them, and she has been direct about the duality that interests her. The countryside is now seen as somewhere to move to in order to be creative — but if you are working class and from there, that lifestyle is unaffordable. She has described the Northern Dales in the terms outsiders use, rolling hills and little stone cottages, and then the reality: you are more likely to live in a pebbledash house or on a council estate.

The other half of the argument concerns ownership. Some of the places she photographed are owned by the wealthiest people in the UK, and would once have sat within a feudal system; in two of the dales she worked across, tenant farming persists and villages remain owned in their entirety by one person — a structure most people assume no longer exists. Against that, the erasure of rural working-class experience makes no sense to her, given how much of the work done in those places is labouring work.

Commission and exhibition

The work was commissioned as part of the Jerwood Photoworks Award, and was on show at Jerwood Space in London at the time of this feature. Coates is a joint recipient of Jerwood/Photoworks Award 4.

The commission structure is worth noting alongside the work: a year of collaborative practice with twelve participants, producing photography, sound, sculpture and writing, is not a body of work that emerges from editorial commissioning.

A working-class practice in the North of England

Coates describes herself as a working-class photographer. Born and based in North Yorkshire, she works across the North of England on rurality, the social history of class, and inequalities relating to low income, using photography, installation and audio. She was educated first in working-class communities and then at the London College of Communication. Her practice revolves around process, participation and working with communities, and questions stories around power, identity, wealth and poverty.

Her work has been exhibited in the UK and internationally, including at the Royal Albert Hall, Reveal-T Photography Festival, Cork Photo Festival and Somerset House. In 2012 she was awarded a Metro Imaging portfolio prize, a Magnum portfolio review and the IdeasTap innovators award; in 2016 she was named in the Magenta Flash Forward top thirty emerging talent; and in 2017 she was one of the artists working in Hull for the UK City of Culture.

In 2020 she was commissioned for a residency at the Maltings with Newcastle University's Centre for Rural Economy and Institute for Creative Arts Practice, developing Daughters of the Soil on the role of women in agriculture in Northumberland and the Scottish Borders. It was exhibited at the Maltings in 2022 before touring to Vane Gallery in Gateshead, and the accompanying publication sold out. In 2022 she was announced as North Sea artist in residence. Her commissioned work has appeared with the Guardian, the BBC, the Telegraph and Bloomberg.

The title is carrying more than a pun, and the work earns both of its readings. The lie of the land is the surveyor's phrase for how ground actually falls — and the project's photographs are attentive in exactly that literal way, to weather, labour and terrain as they are rather than as the pastoral tradition composes them. The lie is also the falsehood: the version of the English countryside sold in landscape painting, tourism and property supplements, from which the pebbledash house, the council estate and the tenant farm have been edited out. Photography built that second version as much as any medium did, which gives the project its particular charge — it uses the instrument of the myth to file a correction, with the twelve women as co-authors of the corrected record rather than evidence in someone else's argument.