Jade Sweeting: It is a masculine dominated scene, but there’s different genres of motorcycles. How, if at all, is this changing, and what’s your immediate community like in Newcastle? Traditionally motorcycles have been quite a boys club, but the exhibition notes describe 900 Miles as representing the “strong, confident women who ride motorbikes”. They're all different but they look similar if you don't know, so I wanted the viewer to really look, take some time. Each jacket’s like a second skin to someone who rides. So all these elements, almost creating a portrait without a face.

There's a sound collage, which is a collection of kickstart sounds, also the smell of the oil. I was looking at these different jackets, how chunky they can be, how they’re sexy, and I wanted to bring together what I focused on within motorcycle culture that isn't so obvious – it's not a picture of a motorbike – and pick out all these elements from my experiences. It’s about my interest in motorcycles and motorcycle culture, also subcultures and fashion within subcultures. Jade Sweeting: The photographs are part of a wider body of work – these zips studies I showed with Workplace Foundation in Newcastle. Every birthday and Christmas I asked for one, but it wasn’t till my 20s I got my first, a 125.Īnd how did 900 Miles initially come about? Jade Sweeting: My best friend Louie and I were joined at the hip as children, and his father, Norman Hartley, was a regional rep for a thing called Motorcycle Action Group, so I've always messed about with motorbikes. Hi Jade! When did you first become interested in motorcycle culture? Elsewhere featuring archival pictures, copies of the first female-specific riders’ magazine, Harley Women, and Sweeting’s actual motorcycle, the focal point of the show, as the artist explains below, is a series of 8x10 photographs depicting the intimate details that make each leather jacket unique. Open now through January 21 at the Northern Gallery of Contemporary Art, 900 Miles is Sweeting’s debut solo exhibition, and marries her two primary worlds: “I've realised, this is how I can get my motorbike culture and my art together, in a way that is unique to myself, and I'm happy with,” she explains. “If you fall off your bike wearing denim it’s gonna tear,” clarifies the long-term chopper enthusiast. The list of individuals who’ve adopted the jacket and the ways it’s become embedded in popular culture is large and varied – from Kathy Acker to Hedi Slimane Tom of Finland’s iconic homoerotic illustrations to Claire Barrow ’s early painted pieces and countless musicians – but for artist-photographer, printmaker and researcher Jade Sweeting, whose new exhibition explores motorcycle culture with a series of photographs, sounds and, notably, the smell of oil, the garment is first and foremost a safety device.

Just a small act of disobedience perhaps, but a nod to the vast lineage of contemporary counterculture all the same.įor Mick Farren, the late musician, writer and author of 1985’s The Black Leather Jacket – a detailed history of the garment in question, with chapter titles such as ‘Smut by Numbers’ and ‘Savage Skins’ – “part of the attraction was that the leather jacket was frowned upon, proscribed and legislated against.” He bought his first jacket at age 15, explicitly because it was a signifier of the Marlon Brando-type big screen bad boys, and because he wanted to emulate the older guys at his school, “the ones who looked cool.”

It could be hypothesised, that when David and Victoria Beckham turned up to a Versace event in 1999, dressed in full matching leather looks by another designer, they were asserting their own, unique brand of rebellion: a riff on the punk reputation of biker leathers, by way of wearing Tom Ford ’s Gucci to honour Donatella.

He chopper gallery