Red Herring, a new exhibition of photographs, ceramics, archival exploration and installation works by Joanne Coates, has just gone on display at Timespan, Helmsdale.
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, 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).
Situated in Helmsdale, a village historically shaped by the Highland Clearances and the transatlantic herring trade, the exhibition explores how local histories connect to global systems of colonialism and labour extraction. Coates expands this analysis by including photographs from the State Archives of North Carolina, drawing transatlantic parallels between racialised labour in fish processing and Scottish herring workers.
The exhibition presents another new commission, Herring Crown (2025) created in collaboration with Helmsdale Primary School. This sculptural work reimagines the tradition of crowning a Herring Queen to celebrate women’s labour. Visitors will be invited to wear the crown and have their portrait taken by the artist during public sessions on 20th–22nd June 2025 as part of the Salt & Silver symposium and during the Herring Crown Parade on 16 August 2025. These portraits will form part of a living archive of Helmsdale’s residents and visitors.
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‘Red Herring’ is on display at Timespan, Dunrobin Street, Helmsdale until 30th September 2025. Find more information here.
Joanne Coates is a working class visual artist using the medium of photography. She lives and works across the North East of England. Her work explores rurality, hidden histories, and inequalities relating to low income through photography, installations, and audio. She uses photography to question stories around power, identity, wealth, and poverty. Visit her website here.