We’re Chanelle Windas and Seren Metcalfe, the co-founding directors of Working Class Creatives which started in 2020. Working Class Creatives is now a thriving community of over 1,000 working-class creatives primarily, across the UK, built to provide connection, support, and opportunities. Born from our own struggles navigating the creative industries without privilege or connections, we created this space to address the barriers working-class artists face; from financial instability to lack of networking opportunities. Through member-led events, meetups, residencies, exhibitions, and industry resources, we foster a supportive environment where creatives on similar journeys can connect and uplift each other. Our mission is to ensure that working-class creatives have equal access to opportunities, visibility, and a strong, like-minded community.
Working on the Many Hands exhibition has been a real pleasure, and I believe this has been largely through working with the Sunny Bank Mills’ team, which have been receptive and adaptive in understanding our class experience, and understood the importance of how ‘working class’ is framed within a gallery, as well as the generosity offered from the exhibiting artists in their time, care and passion for the subject we’re exploring.
As a working class artist/producer/wearer of many hats, there is often less room to fail, both academically and critically within the art world, where expectations and opportunities are quite often shaped by assumptions about legitimacy, authority, and cultural capital, so to do an exhibition like this, it felt pretty scary, but equally super necessary.
This exhibition emerges from a landscape marked by industry, its remnants, and its impacts. It is rooted in a space and in bodies that still bear the weight and solidarities of working class life – where industries, factories, mines, and steelworks have been replaced by “regeneration,” often without recognition of what came before. As such, it was really important for us to look at photographers across an array of generations, backgrounds, workforces, and involve the local community in whichever way feasible. Whilst curating, we were keen to activate the space, to avoid it becoming a nostalgic archive, or a romanticised snapshot of “coal and misery,” instead creating an inspiring space to critically reflect on the lived realities and resistances of working class communities during and after deindustrialisation.
We are aware of the growing critique that working class life must not only be framed through the lens of loss and hardship. That we need to move past documenting Working Class life in a voyeuristic sense. That we should celebrate our roots and our blooms. And this exhibition responds to that. There are joys, there is beauty, there is love. There are lives lived with immense creativity and strength. Many Hands is a celebration of just that, whilst also refusing to look away from the structures of power and political abandonment that shaped, and continue to shape, these communities. The working class are not a relic. We are still becoming, still resisting, still surviving, whether aware of our class distinction, or not. As curators, we really wanted this exhibition to come together as an attempt to honour that motion. For us, to curate, is to care, it is not passive, it is not to spectate, it is an act of reclaiming, reframing, re-telling. Working class life has too often been photographed by others in a way that objectifies or aestheticises us. Either that, or we are rendered invisible altogether. It was therefore important for this exhibition to be made by those within the communities being represented with an ask to join in and contribute. It asks: who has the right to tell these stories, and how do we do so with care, depth, and responsibility?
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General Arts & Culture