Work-Leisure

From the whimsical to the functional, Work-Leisure is a national survey of objects made in leisure time by workers across the UK’s industrial sites, founded by designer Bahbak Hashemi-Nezhad and co-curated and edited with Matthew Harle.

Developed in participation with volunteer workers and makers, Work-Leisure seeks to complicate our understanding of the dynamics between occupation and recreation.

After its first phase documenting workers’ London’s Park Royal Industrial Estate, Work-Leisure has spent 2024-5 exploring Sheffield’s contemporary industrial landscape.

Over several months, Hashemi-Nezhad and Harle visited hundreds of businesses and met with workers to catalogue what was being made after-hours and in between tasks on site and with the materials of their workplaces.

The resulting visual archive contains a diverse range of personal, playful, and practical objects which, although made within an industrial context, fall outside of supply and demand.

Each of these projects – from practical furniture welded together by the city’s steel workers, to whimsical objects cast by plasterers, to games and chess boards made by joiners – demonstrates alternative uses of materials, processes, and techniques within Sheffield’s workshops, factory floors and studios.

From 20th March until 12th April 2025, Work-Leisure will present its findings at Yorkshire Artspace, showcasing objects, photographs, and stories from the Sheffield phase of the project.

Coinciding with the exhibition, a new publication documenting the initiative, designed by Studio Ard and co-authored by Bahbak Hashemi-Nezhad and Matthew Harle, will be released.

More than just an exhibition, Work-Leisure is an evolving repository of working-class ingenuity, a counter-history that values what is often overlooked in industrial narratives.

A national project and a growing archive, it will travel next to Birmingham, followed by two more UK cities, and culminating in a final exhibition at the William Morris Gallery.

Work-Leisure challenges the conventional binary between labour and creativity, rejecting the distinctions between objects categorised as work, craft or art.

In an era of automation and precarious employment, the project explores the politics of industrial labour, creativity, and care, considering how making during work hours, between and after shifts, or with worksite materials can be an act of sustenance, autonomy, even quiet rebellion.