Harry Lawson - Stepney Western

About

Stepney Western is an exhibition comprising a new film by Newcastle-based artist / filmmaker Harry Lawson and archival photography from Richard Blosse, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Dean Chapman, Mik Critchlow, Martine Franck, Chris Killip, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, Markéta Luskačová, Tish Murtha, Davey Pearson and more. At the heart of Stepney Western is Lawson’s experimental documentary, made over the past two years in collaboration with a group of young inner city horse riders from Stepney Bank Stables in Newcastle. It is loosely centred on their Alternative Provision programme — a unique alternative for young people in Newcastle who struggle in mainstream education settings.

Recasting Byker as the Wild West, Stepney Western sits at the porous boundary between fact and fiction combining recontextualised iPhone clips shot by the riders and archival material from North East Film Archive with Lawson’s own footage. What emerges is an intergenerational portrait of this community, incorporating fragments from the 2005 CBBC series The Stables (made with teenagers at Stepney twenty years ago). The film is complemented by a sequence of archival photographs drawn from the rich local collections of AmberSide and the Ouseburn Trust, as well as Stepney’s own archives. The images offer a new perspective on the North East’s social and industrial history and reimagine dominant cultural narratives on regeneration in the area. All photographs operate as an active part of Stepney Western; images considered minor, disregarded or as yet unseen take on a new and urgent resonance when seen through the prism of the Western genre.

Stepney Western is supported by Arts Council England, BFI Doc Society Fund awarding National Lottery funding and Community Foundation. Project partners include Ouseburn Trust, AmberSide Collection, Seven Stories, Nexus, NewBridge Print Studio, Foundation Press, North East Film Archive, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival and Newcastle Contemporary Art.