Intro Bar Gallery | Free
In our increasingly fast-paced world, we rush through life too busy to pay attention to the present as it unfolds in front of us. We hurry to get on, overlooking the moment we are in, perhaps forgetting that the greatest part of our human experience is spent in the routines of our every day.
In a corner of North Yorkshire, just below the moors, Ampleforth – a still deeply rural village – lies tucked along the hillside. The community has been here since records began: some of its families can be traced back to the Domesday Book. This place, like any other, holds the stories of the lives of its inhabitants.
Some were born here almost a hundred years ago; some have been here only a short time; some will stay for their forever; some will soon be gone. For now, the threads of their lives overlap and entwine, leaving impressions on each other and on the place. In turn, the place leaves its mark on them.
These photographs, from an ongoing project, depict the unique and yet universally recognisable everyday details of lives and connections within a rural community and its landscape, focussing on timeless, old certainties vulnerable from our modernising, tidying, technological society.
“Swim around in these deep, deep photographs and then look around your own street, your own village, your own neighbourhood and try and find the timeless stories there because in the end none of us, as Lucy Saggers proves, are very far from the centre of things.” Ian McMillan
“Lucy Saggers is a modern visual poet.” Joe Cornish
Lucy Saggers Biography
Captivated from a young age by the documentary work of James Ravilious in 1970s and 80s Devon, I took over thirty years to follow my ambition of being a photographer. Based in Ampleforth, North Yorkshire, my work centres on rural lives and landscapes, with a particular emphasis on the connections and stories among communities.
I have exhibited regionally and nationally, including at the Mall Galleries as a finalist in the Pink Lady Food Photographer of the Year Award 2015 and 2016, and at the Prince’s Foundation as Winner of Craft Photographer of the Year 2015.
In 2018 five photographs from my Of Life and Land project were shortlisted for the Royal Photographic Society’s International Photography Exhibition 161.
In 2017 my image ‘Coconut slice’ was Highly Commended in the Bowes Museum’s ‘Only in the North’ competition.
In 2015 I reached the second round of the National Portrait Gallery’s Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize.
