Cornish Gold: Joanne Coates’ new photographs at Kestle Barton

Cornwall grows more daffodils than anywhere else in the country, and for a few weeks every spring the Lizard Peninsula turns bright yellow with them. What almost never makes it into a photograph is the person doing the cutting.

A new exhibition at Kestle Barton, the gallery and farmstead above the Helford River, sets out to change that. Cornish Gold: Custodians of the Soil is a year-long body of photographic work by the artist Joanne Coates, made with the flower farmers and pickers who work the fields around Manaccan and the wider Lizard.

📷Credit: Joanne Coates, courtesy Kestle Barton

Why the fields rarely show the people in them

Cornwall produces the majority of the UK’s daffodil crop, yet the labour behind it stays largely out of view. Cornish Gold is the result of a year-long residency at Kestle Barton, running between November 2025 and November 2026, during which Joanne worked closely with flower farmers and pickers to document the people whose work shapes one of the county’s most recognisable seasonal landscapes.

Rather than an idealised version of rural life, the photographs are built around the everyday realities of the job and the communities that keep it going.

📷Credit: Joanne Coates, courtesy Kestle Barton

A year among the flower farms of the Lizard

The exhibition grew out of sustained conversations and time spent alongside people working across the local farming community. Through portraiture and documentary photography, Joanne considers the relationship between people, land and agricultural labour, paying particular attention to the knowledge, care and resilience that keep both the landscape and the livelihoods attached to it going.

📷Credit: Joanne Coates, courtesy Kestle Barton

Photography made from inside the work

Joanne is an artist and a farmworker herself, and that dual position shapes how Cornish Gold was made. Drawing on her own experience of agricultural work, she developed the project in dialogue with the people whose lives and understanding of the land shaped it, rather than observing from the outside.

📷Credit: Joanne Coates, courtesy Kestle Barton

Who is Joanne Coates

Joanne Coates is a British artist working across photography, film and installation. Raised in North Yorkshire and now based in the northeast of England, her practice explores rural life, labour, class and gender, drawing on her own experience of agricultural work and long-term engagement with farming communities.

Working within a documentary tradition while embracing collaborative and socially engaged approaches, Joanne examines the relationships between people, place and work, often focusing on lives and labour that are underrepresented in contemporary visual culture. Her projects combine careful observation with extended periods of research and participation, and she has exhibited nationally and internationally, receiving a number of awards and commissions along the way.

📷Credit: Joanne Coates, courtesy Kestle Barton

Kestle Barton, on the Helford

Kestle Barton is an ancient Cornish farmstead on the Lizard Peninsula, above the Helford River. An award-winning conservation and conversion project gave the old farm buildings new uses, including a barn that became a gallery in 2010. From late March to the end of October each year, the gallery, garden and wildflower meadow host a programme of three free exhibitions and a run of other events. The surrounding barns and farmhouse have been converted into holiday accommodation, with profits going towards funding the exhibition and event programme.

Cornish Gold continues Kestle Barton’s ongoing programme of commissioning artists whose work engages with rural life, land use and place, supporting them to develop new work through sustained time spent with local communities.

📷Credit: Joanne Coates, courtesy Kestle Barton

📷Credit: Joanne Coates, courtesy Kestle Barton

📷Credit: Joanne Coates, courtesy Kestle Barton

📷Credit: Joanne Coates, courtesy Kestle Barton

📷Credit: Joanne Coates, courtesy Kestle Barton

📷Credit: Joanne Coates, courtesy Kestle Barton

Seeing Cornish Gold

Cornish Gold: Custodians of the Soil runs at Kestle Barton, Manaccan, from 12 September to 31 October 2026. The gallery is open Tuesday to Sunday and Bank Holiday Mondays, 10:30am to 5pm, as part of Kestle Barton’s usual free exhibition programme.

Somewhere between the polytunnels and the packing sheds, the photographs make the case that Cornwall’s gold is less about the flowers than the hands that cut them.

📷Credit: Joanne Coates, courtesy Kestle Barton