A Rural Contract
A Rural Contract explores the relationship between rural life, social expectations and the often invisible structures of power that shape individual behaviour. Through photographs of people, animals, agricultural buildings, domestic spaces and landscapes, the project examines how cultural traditions and everyday experiences influence our understanding of belonging, identity and acceptable behaviour.
This work considers how attitudes, beliefs and patterns of behaviour become embedded through family, community, class and lived experience. Within rural environments, these dispositions may be reinforced by longstanding traditions, gender expectations, social hierarchies and the close relationships that characterise smaller communities.
The title suggests an unwritten social contract: a set of expectations about how individuals should behave, what is considered normal and what remains unspoken. While these shared understandings can create belonging and continuity, they may also contribute to the normalisation of unequal power relationships, including those associated with domestic abuse and coercive control.
The project considers how geographical isolation, limited access to support and expectations of privacy or endurance may influence an individual's ability to recognise, question or challenge harmful behaviour. It also explores how attitudes can pass between generations, becoming so familiar that they are rarely recognised as socially constructed.
Rather than presenting rural life as inherently restrictive, the photographs acknowledge its complexities and contradictions. Ordinary places and encounters become opportunities to consider how care, community, vulnerability and control can coexist within the same environment.
The work uses photography to question what lies beneath the familiar appearance of rural life, revealing the relationship between personal experience and wider social structures.
Ultimately, A Rural Contract asks how the environments we inhabit shape what we accept, what we remain silent about and what we believe can change. It considers whether making these structures visible might create space for questioning inherited expectations and imagining different possibilities
