Mike Kelly- MA Photography
Threshold
Mike is a Photography MA student working in the landscape of the Pennines, a landscape scattered with the remnants of past grand initiatives: quarries, mills and abandoned settlements now slipping from both memory and substance.
The commissioned images are informed by the 1826 weavers uprising, in which several thousand handloom weavers marched across the Pennine moors above Rossendale, Lancashire. Descending from the moors, the weavers attacked mills in the valleys below, smashing the power looms that were threatening their way of life. Confronted by the military at Chatterton, six were shot dead. The actions in Lancashire were part of a wider movement across Europe as the effects of the Industrial Revolution were felt first by ordinary people left destitute in its wake.
Each of the Threshold works depicts an ancient hand-hewn gatepost standing on the route of the Lancashire weavers’ march. Built before iron fixings, before mechanised production, the stones mark the boundary between the pre-industrial past and the world of technology that consumed it. They are threshold objects in the most literal sense - once physical boundary markers, the stones also register the point of transition to the industrial world.
Mike has previously exhibited at the Mall Galleries in London, solo shows in Manchester and Rossendale and at Bury Art Gallery and Museum where he was awarded the Cass Art Exhibition prize.
