Babylon Gallery

Generously supported by Pooley, Bendall & Watson, solicitors, Isleham & Ely. 

Saturday 15 January - continues to Sunday 27 February 2011  

Please note the gallery will be closed on Thursday 17 February all day for a private event (for the ADeC box office please use the office entrance - nearest Peacocks Tearooms.)

A welcome return to the Babylon Gallery for photographer Justin Partyka with his new work Black Fen they call it..... 

Saturday 19 February 2011: 2.30pm Artist Justin Partyka in conversation followed by a 3.30pm screening of community arts film Common Ground (see trailer below) at the Babylon Gallery . Free (donations welcome).

In 1975 Virago Press published their first book, Fenwomen by Mary Chamberlain. A pioneering work of oral history, Fenwomen is a collection of interviews with women from the Fenland village of Isleham. Through the women’s voices the book tells the story of almost 100 years of life in this isolated rural community. It describes the experience of women as agricultural labourers and labourers’ wives, and how the flat black Fenland intimately shapes their way of life.

Photographer Justin Partyka visited Isleham over a number weeks during 2010. His large scale colour photographs create a contemporary portrait of the village over thirty years since the oral history of Fenwomen was collected. In that time much has changed in Isleham, but Partyka’s photographs also reveal the timeless way of life in the Fens, the mysterious qualities of the inescapable landscape and how it continues to shape the people who live surrounded by it.

These photographs will feature in a new edition of Fenwomen to be published by Full Circle Editions in January 2011. 

Justin Partyka (b. 1972) is from the county of Norfolk. After completing his studies as a folklorist in 2001 , Partyka began a long-term project photographing the agrarian community of East Anglia. 

Partyka continues to photograph in East Anglia. The work has been shown at various galleries and will feature as an installation at the Museum of English Rural Life in Reading, 2012. Partyka is a prolific image maker with numerous ongoing projects both in the UK and beyond. He has recently been working on a commission in the Fenland of Cambridgeshire for the publisher Full Circle Editions. These photographs will appear in a new edition of the book Fenwomen in early 2011.

Video