Factory Portraits

Factory Portraits is a selection of works produced by Harley Roberts, during his shifts in a glassworks in South Yorkshire. A visual record of nightshift psychosis, mental secretions of the in-between time, sold time and time to never be repaid - the troubled relationship between toil and work, earning a living and earning survival. Not spoken in stark opposition to life within the factory, instead a picture of a rocky marriage between art and labour. A love for the people who make the community what it is but not without an ever-present awareness of the monotony of the overnight machine operator, an endless repetition for which we can’t be anything but thankful.

The works included here were made on stolen time, with grease and dirt from the fingers, with non-sequiturs and overheard conversations. They don’t intend to make any grand statement about life as a factory worker or life as an artist, they simply act as a record of both. Made in the inbetween time, while the rest of the world sleeps and Bombay Sapphire bottles run off the line in their thousands, to be filled up and ready for the weekend. All the while acutely aware that existence only begins outside of factory confines.