Saturday Town looks to the spaces of freedom that are festivals, melas, carnivals. These hedonistic gatherings are steeped in ritual, in traditions that are rooted in Earth time, in cycles of growth, of the sun and moon. These once Pagan collective celebrations have evolved through time and religious beliefs into holidays and other markings of seasonal happenings. The promise of freedom that is Saturday grows from the cycles of the week, from a returning; to Saturday, to Summer Solstice, to Harvest time, to bonfires and gift giving, to candles and eggs. In the UK the rich traditions of local festivals and customs have passed through generations, through industrialisation, Capitalism, Consumerism and technological advances, through separation of self and cyclical rhythm. The hedonistic collective, the release of the imagination, resides in the festivals. We are excited to take Saturday Town into the wild unknown, the Northern imagination that is Beat-Herder Festival! The studio will be roving throughout the weekend of July 15/16, exploring space of abandon! Yes! See you there!
Saturday, the idea of Saturday, is one of freedom, of reinvention. Away from family, work responsibilities and the confines of society, Saturday is a delicious promise of possibility.
It is a heady mix; a hedonistic step into imagination where clothes act as metaphor, hair and make up are poetry. We speak our values with our intuitive selves, passed through generations, through culture, locality, landscape, and onto our bodies, wrapped in imagination, in authenticity.
Saturday Town is a place where we step out of ‘what is expected’ and into our wildest imagination.
In the empty shops lie a pile of mannequins, metal racks stack up in corners. Mirrors, left behind, reflect retail’s demise.
Ending are beginnings and with this, possibility. Imagination is calling us to remake these vacated spaces, these stilled escalators and empty windows, to fill the mirrors with what reflects; our selves.
Imagine that.
Saturday Town is the next iteration of Saturday Girl. The ‘Girl’ is gone, allowing for and welcoming the multitude of identity. The portraits, the studio, the act of photographing and being photographed is method of finding out, of exploring together where are we going as interconnected collective.
With my work I am asking - what are the values and dreams of youth? How can the worn metaphors and poetry of bodily self expression be read through fashion, through presentation of the self? Photography, this most ubiquitous of technologies, acts as pocket mirror, as societal mirror, reflecting what is unsaid, often unintended, through portraiture, through self.
Imagine that.
Saturday Town joins in on the conversations about the reimagining of our shared spaces. Decades of privatization and underfunding in the towns and cities of the UK collide with the chaos of pandemic, of online shopping and collapse of the economy, of societal norms. Who owns the streets and how can all of these empty retail spaces be used to serve people, wellbeing, community, imagination itself?
I will be photographing young folks throughout 2022/23 in towns ands cities across the North with my pop up portrait studio. Saturday Town will be happening in a variety of spaces including empty shops, shipping containers, festival tents and on the streets themselves.
Imagine that.