Who Are Ya’?

Location

Country: UK
City: London
Place: Government Art Collection

Jamie Holman examines the interconnected relationship between the beautiful game and British textiles. Many football teams today owe their beginnings to the industrial workers from mills, factories and railways of England’s growing towns and cities. As a result the sport manifested new working class cultures and formed new industrial identities in the migration of fans from ground to ground. 

Woven at John Spencer Textiles outside Blackburn, Who Are Ya'? captures a moment of singing as fans gather in choirs of thousands to challenge rival identities and confirm their own. The image originates as a police photograph, monitoring the behaviour of fans during fractious encounters in and out of the football grounds of the North of England in the 1990’s. These tapestries serve to disrupt the nostalgia of textiles heritage and question the perceived exclusion of white working class men from cultural engagement. 

Jamie Holman lives and works in Blackburn. His multi-disciplinary works are often fabricated using industrial processes, or with heritage crafts makers and artisans. Holman interrogates history through the lens of personal narratives, exploring archives in order to understand the past, while also engaging communities to understand the present in order to make visible who we were, are now and may yet become.

Jamie Holman graduated from Chelsea College of Art and Design with both B.A. (hons) and Masters degrees and first exhibited as part of the New Contemporaries while a second year undergraduate student. He was a contributing editor for the Saatchi Gallery Magazine Art and Music for twelve years before ‘re emerging’ as a practicing artist in 2016. Holman's work is multi-disciplinary and is often fabricated using industrial processes or with heritage crafts makers and artisans. Holman produces work as one half of 'uncultured creatives' a collaboration with producer and curator Alex Zawadzki, delivering works in public, digital, print and traditional gallery spaces, producing monumental outputs that are informed by the heritage of working class communities, site specific heritage and by historic narratives that lack visibility; in particular the impact of the industrial revolution and the cultures that have manifested as a consequence of its emergence and subsequent decline.

Places

Subjects

Materials & Techniques

textile, tapestry, jacquard woven tapestry

Artist

Jamie Holman (1973 - )

Title

Who Are Ya’?

Date

2021

Medium

jacquard tapestry

Dimensions

height: 150.0 cm; width: 250.0 cm; depth: 8.0 cm

Acquisition

Purchased from Second Act, March 2022

Provenance

The Second Act, Blackburn UK; from whom purchased by UK Government Art Collection, 31 March 2022

GAC number

19079