Production lines are rolling on Line Time, the second visual arts project by members of the Freedom Women Collective - female artists who survived war, conflict and forced displacement, and resettled as refugees to Hull and East Yorkshire. Freedom Women Collective came together in 2023 thanks to an IWM 14-18 NOW Legacy Fund commission in partnership with Freedom Festival Hull. We co-created the highly successful exhibition Tomorrow as a multi-visual, multi-story reference to hope, belief and self-determination and a way of looking to the future together.

Inspired and motivated by the IWM 14-18 NOW Legacy Fund commission, we chose to continue our innovative collaborative and creative method of visually documenting and communicating often invisible or unseen lived experiences as central to our own self-representation. Doing so enables us to reflect on our artistic practice without engaging directly with traumatic experiences and move beyond the dominant, mediated narrative of refugee woman. 

Our ongoing conversations led to Line Time, which explores historic and contemporary factory labour undertaken by refugee women and migrant workers during peacetime and wartime. We are currently collaborating with Dr Pippa Oldfield, a specialist in gender, war and photography at Teesside University, and with archives including IWM and Reckitt Heritage Archive Hull. Currently a work-in-progress, our project is dynamic. We research, uncover, discover and experiment with themes of factory themes through sketching, painting, photography, archival photos, screen-printing and poetry.

Line Time emerged from the experiences of Freedom Women Collective and Sudanese artists Arafa Gouda, and Ethar and Mayas Dirar. Ethar and Mayas work the early morning or late-night shifts on the production lines of local factories to make a living or supplement an income whilst continuing to study. One week they are wrapping breaded chicken, another week packing cakes, peas or parts for fitted kitchens. 

At the same time, Freedom Women Collective documentary photographer and visual researcher Dr Lee Karen Stow was researching the unseen lives of female factory workers in her East Hull family during the First and Second World Wars. These women include her grandmother and great aunts who made canisters for Brasso cleaning polish at Reckitt & Son (see blog post, The Canister Girls). Her mother also worked on post war production lines assembling metal boxes, rubber fan belts and typewriters until the mid-1970s. 

Meanwhile, Arafa began researching archival evidence of factory women in Sudan, to draw attention to invisible female factory workers everywhere whose stories, hard work and existences have been lost or are unrecognised.

We brought together our experiences, knowledge and vision to co-create Line Time to engage with the relatively unexplored themes of refugee, migrant and local women’s labour on the shop floor, assembling and packing items used in our everyday lives. What stories are told or untold? What dreams and ambitions are shared or imagined? Who is my fellow worker? What is going on in the world outside these factory walls? Here is a relatively hidden place dominated by productivity and counted by the clock.

“The factories where I work are 100% sterile” says Mayas. “You will not see plants and greenery. But we can still bring that side of the factory through us. We bring our life to the factory; every person brings their life to the factory. In the factory we are all wearing the same, but everyone is different, unique and has their own story.”

Our research is also informed by actively visiting World Heritage sites, galleries and national collections related to our subject. In the midst of winter, as snow fell on the Yorkshire Moors, we walked the flagged floors of Salts Mill in Saltaire, Bradford. Once the world’s largest factory employing thousands of textile workers, the floors now host works of art. Another day we were given an exclusive tour of the Reckitts Heritage Archive at Hull’s historic Dansom Lane factory and saw 100-year-old artwork designs for household products like Brasso, Windolene and Dettol.

More recently, Sarah Paterson, IWM curator of First World War and early 20th Century, gave us a tour of the Blavatnik Art, Film and Photography Galleries at Imperial War Museum London. We studied important paintings from the collection of factory women by commissioned female artists of the past. With Dr Pippa Oldfield, we looked at photographs of women’s work in the First World War by Olive Edis, the UK’s first officially commissioned female photographer of war.

We also pored over albums of archive photos of factory work held in the IWM Women’s Work Collection. What we have found so far, moves beyond the familiar and well-known representation of women munitions workers in wartime, to less familiar scenes of the factory and how women’s lives were impacted and which resonate today.

As practising artists, we come together in collaborative workshops we call ‘shifts’, to talk, share sketches and scribbled thoughts. We discuss ways we can scale-up our evolving material as a visual installation and exhibition. We are joined in our workshops by women who arrived to our area as economic migrants and students who worked for many years in local factories before resuming their professional careers. As we build our project, we are hoping more local factory women join us to share stories and make their marks on our artistic production line.

That’s all for now - we have to clock back on and continue our shifts to complete the artworks. Please contact us if you would like to collaborate on hosting an exhibition of Line Time, and please follow us via our website www.freedomwomencollective.com 

• Line Time is co-produced by Dr Pippa Oldfield (Teesside University) and Dr Lee Karen Stow (Independent Visual Researcher and Project Coordinator) in partnership with members of the Freedom Women Collective, and MIMA School of Creative Arts & Industries at Teesside University. With thanks to Teesside University and the Arts and Humanities Research Council Impact Acceleration Account (IAA), part of the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) for funding our initial phase.