SINGING THE FISHING

Visual Arts Exhibition, November 2025

FILET SPACE, London

Nighttime street scene featuring a storefront named 'FILET' with a large window displaying black and white landscape images. A blurred person and motorcycle pass by in front of the store, and a staircase is visible to the right.

Singing the Fishing presents ongoing doctoral research in architectural design that explores how oral knowledge can be used to write alternative architectural and landscape histories.

A black teardrop-shaped weight hanging from a clip against a background with black and white abstract patterns.

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. 

Display window with black and white landscape photographs, including mountains and a river, and a sign above labeled "FILET."
Photo of a wall with various pictures, including a close-up of rocks, sea shells, and an ocean with ropes, and other landscape images.
Black-and-white textured art prints hanging in a gallery, partially obscuring a window with a tree outside.
Close-up of a framed black-and-white photograph depicting a person wearing a garment and bandages, with handwritten notes below the image describing the artwork as 'Hemming Cutters in Darkness, Tom Kent, circa 1900. The notes mention to see hands in bandages for protection from the gadding knife.'
Gallery wall displaying five abstract blue art prints arranged horizontally in a white room.