Commissioned Essayist, Women Portraits: Trades & Professions, Gallery Oldham, 2026

Commissioned by Charlotte Hodes, Dr Leila Nassereldein wrote the opening essay for the catalogue accompanying Women Portraits: Trades & Professions, her major solo exhibition at Gallery Oldham. Bringing together intricate papercuts and ceramic vessels, the exhibition constructs imagined portraits of women through the tools, gestures and materials of their work – from medicine, botany and astronomy to horticulture, arboriculture and industrial trades.

Nassereldein’s essay, Cutting History into Form, develops a materialist reading of Hodes’s practice. Rather than treating labour as the exhibition’s subject alone, she argues that it enters the works structurally. Bodies lean, brace, lift and hold; tools cease to function as illustrative attributes and become compositional forces. Technique appears as accumulated knowledge: history sedimented in posture, touch and the calibration of hand and eye.

The essay brings Walter Benjamin’s anthropological materialism into dialogue with Hodes’s methods. Her papercuts produce form through incision and removal, while her ceramics gather matter through throwing, layering, stencil and transfer. Between subtraction and accumulation, the works register different temporalities of labour. The cut becomes a historiographic operation: it interrupts seamless narratives of progress and exposes history as partial, uneven and saturated with tensions.

Attending to the exhibition’s location in Oldham, Nassereldein also considers how regional histories of women’s labour persist beyond the conventional archive—in tools shaped by use, bodies trained through repetition and techniques transmitted under conditions of necessity, skill and constraint.

The essay proposes that Hodes’s work does not simply represent women at work; it thinks through labour materially. Artist and subject are joined by repetition, precision and resistance, while the making of the image carries the history it seeks to disclose.