For Tish, Love Plot x (2024)

For Tish, Love Plot X , (2024).

Tish (2023, d. Paul Sng, 90 minutes) is a tender portrait of Tish Murtha (1956–2013), a working class woman photographer from South Shields, whose work has been marginalised by dominant histories. Challenging the socio-economic inequalities of 1970s-80s Thatcher’s Britain, Tish Martha's political and intimate photographs chronicled the precarious and beautiful lives of the working class Tyneside communities she knew. In the documentary film, the artist’s daughter, Ella Murtha, highlights the importance of Tish’s photographs, archive, and legacy and questions why her mother's work has not received the critical attention it deserves. 

For Tish, Love Plot X was a two-part event where the film was screened, followed by a discussion with the curators from PLOT, a collective of visual practitioners (Hatty Frances Bell, Alice Butler, Anna Gormley, and Kelly O’Brien) who work with expanded photography, film, and writing. Afterward, the collective invited the public to join them in the gallery next door, where a collection of works (and works-in-progress) made in response to the film and Tish’s life and politics were shown.

Bell, Butler, Gormley, and O’Brien activated the space for this flash residency with images, textiles, writings, invisible labour performances, and fictional storytelling ..