Red Herring: Joanne Coates and the Herring Girls

Joanne Coates’ solo exhibition Red Herring centres the lesser-known and excluded histories of the Herring Girls, also known as the Gutting Girls or Herring Lasses. The exhibition revisits the role of an all-female workforce, who were instrumental in the Scottish fishing industry between the 18th and 20th centuries.

Culminating from a six-month residency at Timespan and shaped by Coates’ Northern English working-class background and feminist practices of care, listening, community and solidarity, the exhibition draws on research, creative collaboration and active participation from local organisations, women and schoolchildren. Through photographs, archival images and ceramic sculptures, it addresses the omissions in these histories, reclaiming them with a focus on themes of class, gender and racial inequities.

The Helmsdale Harbour was built in 1815 to support the expanding global herring fish trade prevalent in the North Sea, and relied heavily on women employed as herring gutters. Primarily Scottish and some as young as fourteen, these women came from as far as Shetland and the Outer Hebrides, seasonally migrating with the fish along the east coast between July and November, journeying as far south as Great Yarmouth. As they gutted and packaged herring for consumption, they not only sustained local economies, but also played a role in the larger global trade network. 

Coates notes that statues commemorating the Herring Girls across these fishing towns often present them in a romanticised way, rarely acknowledging the harsh realities of their work. Although the women did gain independence by working away from home, they laboured in precarious conditions, both physically demanding and economically exploitative. Further, their seasonal migration to the South, carrying their local cultures, religious practices and their Gaelic tongue, often subjected them to marginalisation. Despite this, their agency through collective organising is demonstrated, for instance, with the Great Yarmouth Strike of 1936.

The herring trade was closely tied to the transatlantic slave trade and the colonial legacies of the early 1900s, before decline after the First World War due to disrupted trade routes alongside the dwindling stocks caused due to overfishing, forcing the industry to shift elsewhere. In tracing these histories, Coates uncovers a broader network extending to America’s Southern states, where Black women continued to undertake similar work, while facing restricted freedom, exploitative wages, and systemic racial discrimination, even after the abolition of slavery. Coates also discovers a direct link with Ghana, then part of the colonial empire, where herring was exported as a cheap food source.

The colour red encompasses the space, reflected off the red vinyl curtains framing an installation that displays archival images along with the artist’s photographs. It symbolises the bloody labour of gutting fish, while also referencing the herring’s change in colour during the process of salting and smoking, preserving it for export. The curtains further allude to modern fish factories, often carried out by migrant labour under harsh conditions, indicating similar work in the industry today. The title also plays on the idiom, meaning distraction from the truth, which Coates uses to critique the misleading narratives perpetuated by capitalist structures.

The archival images of the Herring Girls sourced from Timespan, the Shetland and Highland museum and archive collections, and the Perry-Belch Company and Cannons Fisheries in North Carolina, depict groups of women in their work attire, often posed in studio settings or staged as tableaux vivants, presenting a stark contrast to the harsh realities of their labour. Coates reflects on the male-authored photographs, and how gendered working-class narratives have historically been documented to align with prevailing social norms. Today, many local families maintain strong ties to the fishing industry, tracing their ancestry back to these Herring Girls who once formed a central part of the community.

Flirting with Class, 2025 by Joanne Coates. Courtesy of the artist

Coates invited the women from the community to share stories of their mothers and grandmothers, many of which reveal what Coates describes as “injuries of the system.” One recounted a grandmother with dementia who continued to insist on warming her feet in a bucket of boiling water – a practice from her time as a Herring Girl enduring the freezing conditions. Through her own series of black-and-white photographs, Coates reimagines their lives while engaging with literary critic Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, exploring how trauma and memory are transmitted across generations. Instead of photographing the women directly, she honours their memories through photographic performance and retelling, using her own body as a site of remembrance. Printed on smooth pearl paper, the evocative photographs capture ghostly traces of the numerous women who have traversed the expansive landscapes with their wooden trunks, while close-ups of bandaged hands and feet soaking in pails of warm water after long, arduous days are paired with visuals of tools like hooks and gutting knives.

Coates thus positions the exhibition as a model for engaging both the local community and a wider audience, revealing how class and gender hierarchies, along with the complexities surrounding inherited histories, continue to shape our present. 

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Red Herring, Timespan, Helmsdale, open daily until 30 Sep, 10am-5pm