SINGING THE FISHING

The work centres around the Herring Girls — migrant women who followed the migrating herring shoals from the Scottish Highlands and Islands down Britain’s East Coast to gut and pack in the 19th to the mid-20th century. As migrant, working-class women, the Herring Girls have been historically marginalised in national and architectural archives. Working with the folk songs and traditional music of these women, Singing the Fishing works to surface their histories and reimagine this landscape through song, voice, and movement to write this architectural history.

Drawing on recent fieldwork undertaken in the Outer Hebrides and Orkney Isles, this exhibition brings together sound, image, and text gathered during residencies with Sail Britain and Piers Arts Centre. These journeys northwards trace the rhythms of migration, sea, and memory through artistic audio-visual responses - an unfolding methodology developed with site-responsive and archival work.