This project explores what happens to communities when once thriving mills, offering employment to company villages, are closed down and demolished. It approaches this deindustrialised landscape as a site of trauma and loss. It brings together psychoanalysis, cultural geography and non-representational theory to develop a photography project of hand gestures used in noisy mills, as a way of healing and rebuilding communities. It aims to develop interdisciplinary, creative approaches to the real-life problems of post-industrial areas where communities are eroded or divided and argues for care provision and healing opportunities.

It expands on my earlier ethnography of Bailliff Bridge’s carpet factory in West Yorkshire, which was demolished in 2002 (Taylor, 2019a). I examined how ageing ex-workers and residents responded to spatial change by using innovative ‘walk and talk’ tours (Carpiano, 2009) and by gathering photographs and objects (industrial machinery, retrieved mill bricks). My proposed project aims to investigate the importance of these photographs/objects to examine the creative potential of nostalgia as a response to loss in late-modernity (Keightley and Pickering, 2012). Drawing on photographic motifs and ex-worker knowledge, artist Catherine Bertola will make large scale photographs depicting the hand gestures, used to communicate and make carpets, to be displayed along the perimeter fences where Clifton Mill once stood, making visible the once hidden, now lost labour of this site. 

The research hopes to re-bind the damaged tissues of a community, so that older respondents begin to develop affective ties with newcomers who now reside in housing developments around the once-mill. By deepening an understanding of why photographs are so important to respondents, this project will empirically test out the positive reclamation of nostalgia as an emotion that helps people cope with loss. My work will argue that psychotherapeutic care should be offered to communities experiencing catastrophic spatial and communal loss.