machine women

The Spinning Jenny (by Mimi McGarry)

We were keen on Helmshore mill from the start, and this here is the infamous spinning jenny, stood in the middle of a big room, filled with several different machines doing various cotton thread producing tasks, at the core of the mill. First we are told about working conditions, imagine the deafening sounds from all the machinery, the oil trickling down the sides of the machines and then the horror stories we are told about the unstoppable machines and therefore action by the worker who was running them: "you just could not stop". Explosions, lost fingers or limbs, scalping, you name it. What would it have been like day in day out in this room with the machines cranking and screaming, where a wrong step or a slip of focus could lead to a lot of pain or even death?

It is the demonstration of the simple chain of physical human movement necessary when operating the spinning jenny, that grabs my complete attention. It is the barefoot worker in their own rhythm coping with all other work systems simultaneously happening in their surrounding; one long step forward to release a leaver, the arm stretching to do the same somewhere higher up, and then the body gently resuming a straight position. Once released the machine would begin marching backwards and then returning along the same path, screaming and muttering, spinning the thread and creating rows and rows of caps filled with cream cotton ready for weaving. Whilst the jenny was marching back and fro, the worker was always pacing up and down along the the travelling branch of the machine, following its movement with their own path set alongside. This moving connection of worker's path with the machine's path would repeat again and again, unless one of the strings tore. In this case the worker has to work all along the row finding which threads had torn and fixing those as quickly as possible, licking their fingers to do so and twisting together the torn stands of cotton.

What interests me is the never-ending pattern of paths, which is drawn out by the relationship of human and machine continuously moving as one entity inside a cotton storm, eerie, magic, crude, throat clogging. The movements required seem angular, geometric. It was a highly efficient continuous activity, no one ever stopped, everyone functioned. Machine and worker therefore appear like two cogs joining together to meet the requirements. It is this close relationship between the movement of machinery and its moving operator that in my mind defines the physicality of work.