Vanessa Short is a London-based artist with roots in North-West England. She uses photography, written texts and audio to document social history, specifically the transformation over time of industries, communities and the environment.
Short’s work incorporates old and new processes: images captured with a digital camera emerge as photogravures, a long-established printmaking technique that has been revived thanks in part to the advent of digital technologies.
Short has received Arts Council England funding for several creative ventures. Other Side of the Line, 2015, arose from an extensive period investigating the repercussions of the 1984 – 85 miners’ strike. The strike marked a seismic shift in the UK’s industrial and economic landscape and has great personal significance for her: Short’s grandfather and father were both miners at the start of the dispute, based in Flintshire, North Wales and Yorkshire, England respectively.
A second grant enabled Short to turn her lens on the women of the strike, documenting their roles in this apparently male-dominated struggle for a decent wage.
Short is currently looking at our effects on the planet, in COUP, counting out our Planet. Images are printed with handmade soot ink.