This photo series celebrates the muddy feminine heart of Northern rural farming

Farming culture in Britain is rife with stereotypes. For children, the farm is synonymous with animal education – the UK’s favourite claymation flicks Chicken Run and Shaun The Sheep offer childish hijinks but not much else. For adults, the idea of farmers is usually a masculine one, although in the 2010s a handful of movies such as God’s Own Country or Xavier Dolan’s Tom At The Farm added much needed complexion with their queer perspectives. Nevertheless, it makes sense as to why the Manchester-based photographer Kat Wood returned to her childhood to shoot her latest photo series The Tree Of Life; she wanted to capture the feminine heart of the hill farming industry she knew and loved.

“My mum and sister run the farm, and I’m one of three daughters. Farming culture, especially hill farming, is so often framed through a masculine perspective: machinery, physical endurance, ruggedness,” says Kat. “But women have always been at the heart of farming. They keep it running while also raising families, caring for animals, managing households, and holding together the emotional fabric of these places.” Although the labour is rarely seen, generations of hill farming relies on the gritty work done by women.

Wanting to reflect “a real tenderness in the way animals are raised and tended to”, Kat set out to capture the necessary pragmatism and brutal decisions that farming life demands through honest photography. Photos of ceilings draped in streaks of dirt and dust, to dead chickens hung upside down communicate a feeling of infinite suspension that mirrors the way feminine farming is left in the air – there but never really acknowledged. Other photos seek to ground feminine farming quite literally, through the inescapable earthy tones of green, yellow and brown grass, shaved cow furs and sunlight rippled across fields. “Farms are full of contrasts; life and death are constant companions,” says Kat.

A motif throughout the series is the egg, the proverbial beginning of all life, the symbol of the past and the future – and Kat shows the humble egg in such tender ways, whether it’s luminescent, broken or whole, colouring its female associations with equal doses of hope and vulnerability. Just like an egg, the domestic interiors of farm life can carry softness as well as brutality, “the hard decisions that have to be made when animals are sick or failing”, says the photographer.

Kat’s arsenal includes medium format colour film and portable flashes, her approach is documentarian and her style is unsparing but undoubtedly warm. “Because of my closeness to the people I photograph, I feel comfortable asking them to pause and hold a gesture, or look into the lens,” says Kat. “This allows for moments that sit somewhere between candid and constructed, images that feel lived-in and emotionally resonant rather than detached or voyeuristic.”

The intimacy and familiarity created in this series comes from the family roots – Kat knew the pulse and rhythm of farm life and so, she could approach subjects in an unguarded fashion, creating space to capture moments that would hide away from other photographers. “At the same time, that intimacy carries its own weight. I’m deeply aware of the emotional and physical toll this way of life takes, and how much of it is bound up in family relationships. It made me more sensitive to the small details and gestures, the love and compromise, that run through these farms,” says Kat.

It’s all in the love of farming, but not the romanticised vision of rural life nor the movie-esque ruggedness of masculine machinery and physical endurance, it’s a “more complex, in-between space: working farms that are economically precarious, emotionally demanding, sustained by layers of care and compromise”. Kat hopes to create nuance and resonance with real rural communities and for urban audience – to challenge what they may get wrong about the women in the middle of it all, even if Chicken Run does make a good case for women’s togetherness.