"Little bits, as fly off fro' the cotton, when they're carding it, and fill the air till it looks all fine dust. They say it winds round the lungs, and tightens them up".
Elizabeth Gaskell, "North and South".
This piece of work was made for the Victorian Lancashire project connected to Preston Arts Festival this year. A spark of inspiration came to me while I was looking at a beautifully bound little hospital record book from Blackpool Victoria Hospital, dated just after the death of Queen Victoria. The Lancashire Archives are full of little gems like this but they just take a bit of finding. I had planned to do work relating to the Lancashire Cotton Mills so items such as a man having a leg accidentally amputated by a tramcar was not going to be helpful.
I began to think about what would have been recorded in medical records in the mill towns in the Victorian era. At the same time I came across the quote about cotton workers lung (or byssinosis to give it it's medical name) which was from the Elizabeth Gaskell book "North and South".
The resulting work represents part of a lung progressively filling up with cotton dust.
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