Joanne Coates, Trajicere i, 2024. Photograph printed on Ilford Prestige Smooth Pearl. 25.4 x 30.5 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Red Herring explores the overlooked histories of women’s labour and class solidarity through the legacy of the Herring Girls—an itinerant all-female workforce central to the fishing industry between the 18th and 20th centuries. Developed during a six-month residency at Timespan in Helmsdale, the project is grounded in archival research, community collaboration and Coates’ lived experience as a working-class artist.

Red Herring brings to light the stories of the Herring Girls—also known as Gutting Girls or Herring Lasses—who travelled seasonally to coastal towns gutting and packing fish. Often underpaid, injured, and working in harsh conditions, these women formed complex communities that carved out independence in a male-dominated public space. A key moment of collective resistance—the 1936 Great Yarmouth strike—is highlighted in the exhibition as an overlooked instance of working-class protofeminist organising.

The exhibition’s central photographic series sees Coates reenacting the gestures, routines, and acts of care that defined the Gutting Girls’ daily lives, using her own body as a site of inquiry. These coexist with archival photos from Timespan and Shetland Museum and Archives collections to re-examine historical imagery of the gutting girls—not simply as documentary evidence but as constructed representations. As historical photography often framed rural working-class women as passive and content, it fed into gendered representations of class that persist today. Coates disrupts these representations, instead presenting working-class women’s labour as an active and complex struggle in the series Labour Pains (2025), Submerge (2024), Trajicere (2024), and Involvo (2024).

To find out more please go to the direct link.