Cotton Pickers
An exhibition of photographs by Simon Jones

From 16th February throughout 2013

Simon Jones creates photographic artworks about memory. His work relies on illusion and the belief in the photograph to create images that fall somewhere between fact and fiction.

The intention is to create images that visualise a memory of cotton’s history, linking it back with its place of origin and hands that picked it. The figures in the scenes are arranged in such a way as to appear to be gathering up and re-collecting the cotton fragments and fibres from the floor of the mill. In doing so, the figures make a gesture towards the notion of recollection, remembering and memory of cotton’s histories.

Remembering this past has special power at Quarry Bank Mill. The images show the beginning of the chain of production which once would have brought cotton from the USA to Quarry Bank Mill. The people in these images are not slaves; but their past is linked to the legacy of slave plantations. From its first days, the cotton used in the mill came from the USA, picked by enslaved Africans.

Slavery in the USA was only abolished in the 1860s; although this brought new freedoms it did not bring an equal economy. Men, women and children continued to work long hours in the cotton fields of the American South in abject poverty.

Just like in the Mill, adults and children worked long hours in harsh conditions. Images of these children toiling under the baking sun of the American South are used by Simon to create a link between the workers here at Quarry Bank Mill and those in the fields.