Tessa Bunney exhibition at Mercer Gallery
North Yorkshire based photographer Tessa Bunney travels the world, looking at the way different landscapes have been shaped by human activity.
Home Work explores the lives of women workers in villages around Hanoi, Vietnam places where foreigners seldom visit.
Between September 2006 and May 2008, Bunney spent two six month periods in Vietnam, travelling around the suburbs and villages near the capital city of Hanoi, photographing domestic labour and rural life. Currently, around 75 per cent of the population of Vietnam are farmers. As Vietnam moves towards urbanization, the
country's
agricultural labour force faces the prospect of losing both its land and its way of life to urban projects. Families are turning to the creation of various products in rural areas.
These 'craft' villages have become the meeting place between rural and urban, agriculture and industry.
Tessa Bunney hired a driver and an interpreter and set out on her travels.
'Often, it wasn't difficult to work out the speciality of each village, the whirring of silk weaving machines in VanPhúc coming from every house as I wandered around the back streets, sheets of noodles drying in the rice fields in Tân Hòa or whole communities sitting in their doorways making various forms of the ubiquitous palm hat.'
During the last decade, along with rapid national economic development many craft villages have increased production up to five fold through small-scale industrial development. The consequence of this is increased waste and environmental pollution with the resources of the landscape becoming overused.
Bunney documents the changes and decline of traditional rural industries and the impact this has had on communities and the environment.
This, along with the role of female workers, often in harsh industries, gives Tessa Bunney's
work a strong political undercurrent.
Interspersed with images from daily life on the rice field and in the villages, Bunney's photographs depict 'working from home' in an unromanticised sense, where women balance childcare with the work necessary for survival.
The artist's work draws attention to details which we usually let slip by unnoticed , and aims to contribute to the ongoing debate about the changing nature of rural life.
Tessa said,
'My approach is based on intuition, my work always has a level of personal response to each individual person or place It is more about collaboration and letting the story unfold rather than having set ideas at the outset.'
Wherever she took photographs, Tessa bought whatever items the village produced. So the exhibition will include still-life displays of the actual objects made in Vietnam, such as incense sticks, skeins of silk, noodles and palm baskets, seen alongside over 50 large scale colour photographs.
About Tessa Bunney:
Previous projects include
'Hand to Mouth, a journey through the Romanian Carpathians' which was exhibited and published by Impressions Gallery, Bradford in 2007, 'Moor and Dale,' based on the artist's residency in Nidderdale, which was exhibited and published by The Mercer Art Gallery, Harrogate and shown at various venues in the UK including Hereford Photography Festival, 2004.
'Eat Better, Eat British'
received an Honourable Mention in the Leica Oskar Barnack Award and was shown at Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie, Arles, France in 2000.