Migrant Women

The changing environment of our cities is sometimes easy to see, and sometimes almost invisible. People move, put down roots, and, like plants and animals, evolve and acclimatise; their culture, customs and faiths becoming hybrids.
In these portraits, eight women who have migrated from other countries (Madagascar, Finland, Canada, Lithuania, Belarus, Iraq, China and Ireland) are photographed with plants and animals which, like them, are not indigenous, but tell stories of migration – through our history and ever expanding global world. Mbola stands in front of a fig tree growing by the railway in Armley, Galina holds her dog, a Shih Tzu, descendant and hybrid of the dog of the Chinese emperors, Giedre stands in a cluster of Silver Birch in Gotts Park. These trees would have been one of the first to re-colonize the rocky landscape when the huge glaciers of the last ice age receded (more information about the stories is coming soon)
The reason the portrait subjects are women is because there are complications of the migrant experience that are specific to them. Women leave their mothers, their motherland and their mother tongue, and have their children away from what was home; like the birds, they nest in foreign lands. Their children in turn grow up in what may always seem a partly alien place, and they effectively become multicultural (often multilingual) hybrids, belonging to more than one culture. Some of the subjects are themselves children, daughters of immigrants, finding their own place in the community. They are both party to and part of how this community changes.