An artist has been commissioned to work with Barrow townsfolk to create an exhibition based around the Sankey family’s photographic archive.
Nicky Bird will be part of Unwrap the Image, Signal Film and Media’s final project with the collection.
In Unwrap the Image, Bird will work with local people to explore the archive, respond to the images, and create an exhibition which will be held at Cooke’s Studios in spring 2022.
The show will mark the end of the Sankey Family Photographic Collection Project and will be complemented with the launch of the online collection website and final publication
Bird is a socially engaged artist whose art investigates archive photographs and the hidden stories they tell. She often collaborates with people who have significant connections to the places captured in photographs as well as including artefacts, oral histories, and archaeology as part of her work.
She said: “I am really thrilled to be working with the Sankey collection. The portraits of unidentified women working in Barrow’s paper mills immediately caught my attention.
“These photographs raise all kinds of compelling questions about these women’s lives and history of the site of the former papermill, which itself may dramatically change over the next few years.
“It has already been a real privilege to hear local women’s own stories of their working lives at the papermill – so very much within living memory.”
Barrow’s papermill was started by Barrow Chemical Wood Pulp Company, who opened a factory in the Salthouse area (now Salthouse Mills Industrial Estate) and became Kilner Partington Pulp Company in 1892.
From around 1900 to the 1920s, the Sankey family documented the factory at work – from the wood being brought in by ship, to boxes of paper being exported to places as far afield as Australia.
The Barrow Paper Mill employed hundreds of people up until its closure in 1972.
Since this time it has been home to industrial tenants as well as hosting a unique skatepark.
Barrovians Edward Sankey, and his sons Raymond and Eric, took thousands of images around Furness, Cumberland and Westmorland – which now make up Cumbria – as well as North Lancashire and beyond.
Seeing the North with Sankey is Signal Film and Media’s two-year heritage photography project which digitised and repacked the archive of 15,000 glass plate and acetate
negatives and 20 handwritten postcard books produced by the Sankeys and donated by the Sankey family in the hope it will be accessible for the local community and future generations.
The collection is believed to be the largest of its kind which documents Barrow comprehensively between the years of 1890 and 1970.
