Jacqueline Sarsby trained as social anthropologist at the London School of Economics. Her doctoral thesis was later published by Penguin Books as Romantic Love and Society (1983).
She did DHSS/SSRC funded, anthropological research into the experience of multi-problem families and, with Frank Coffield and Philip Robinson, published their findings as A Cycle of Deprivation? (Heinemann Educational Books 1980).
After a temporary post at Keele University, in 1978 she took up a tenured lectureship at the University of Kent, and became interested in both oral history and black and white photography.
Using oral history, she took a sabbatical to research into the work and home lives of women pottery-workers in North Staffordshire, and this was published as Missuses and Mouldrunners (Open University Press, 1988.)
In 1987, after fieldwork in Devon, researching into the lives of women on Devon farms, she left the University and went freelance. For ten years she researched into and lectured part-time about the Arts and Crafts Movements in the Stroud Valleys. She wrote and photographed freelance and did two periods of fieldwork on Dartmoor. In 1991 she learned to work in the dark room at Stroud College, and later joined the photographic group, Fotoforum, in Stroud.
Photography and freelance writing.
In 1992 she started to exhibit black and white photographs: ‘Indoors and Out, A Portrait of the Small Farm’, shown at the Museum of English Rural Life at Reading University, at Exeter University and at Dartington (1992-3).
She had a grant from S.W. Arts for a rural touring exhibition, ‘Changing Rural Devon’
and then exhibited ’Farm Women’, combining photographs with the recorded voices of women on Devon farms, shown at the Exeter and Devon Art Centre, Spring (1994), the Somerset Museum of Rural Life and Newport College of Art as part of the ‘Signals’ Festival of Women Photographers.
Her exhibition, ‘Pottery Workers’ (1994) was shown at Keele Gallery and the Gladstone Pottery Museum, Stoke-on-Trent. She was also one of the exhibitors in the ‘Resourceful Women’ exhibition at Staffordshire University.
In 1995 she showed ‘Farm Women’ at the Hereford Photography Festival and an exhibition about Memory at the Festival, the following year. In 1996, her Devon photographs won the prize for photographs at the International Festival of Ethnographic Film at the University of Kent.
In 1995-6, she further trained in photography at Newport College of Art, but suffered a bad whiplash from an accident in November 1995.
In 2004 she combined long-term research, writing and photographs in her book Sweetstone, Life on a Devon Farm, published by Green Books in 2004.
In 2011, she combined with Hilary Burns, the basket-maker, to show ‘Tracing the Blueprint’, an exhibition about the historical path of indigo-printed textiles across the world, at the Guild of Devon Craftsmen at Bovey Tracey, and again at the Museum in the Park, Stroud, in 2014.
In 2018 her research about the life of a Dartmoor farmer will be (all being well) incorporated into the ‘Devon Lives’ exhibition at Exeter Royal Albert Memorial Museum, and in 2019, her research (again all being well!) will be an important part of the exhibition about William Simmonds at Gloucester Museum.
BOOKS:
Romantic Love and Society (1983).
With Frank Coffield and Philip Robinson, A Cycle of Deprivation? (1980).
Missuses and Mouldrunners (1988.)
Sweetstone, Life on a Devon Farm, (2004.)
PHOTOGRAPHIC EXHIBITIONS:
‘Indoors and Out, A Portrait of the Small Farm’, shown at the Museum of English Rural Life at Reading University, at Exeter University and at Dartington (1992-3).
S.W. Arts funded rural touring exhibition, ‘Changing Rural Devon’
’Farm Women’, combining photographs with the recorded voices of women on Devon farms, shown at the Exeter and Devon Art Centre (1994), the Somerset Museum of Rural Life and Newport College of Art as part of the ‘Signals’ Festival of Women Photographers.
‘Pottery Workers’ (1994) shown at Keele Gallery and the Gladstone Pottery Museum, Stoke-on-Trent. She also took part in the ‘Resourceful Women’ exhibition at Staffordshire University.
‘Farm Women’ shown at the Hereford Photography Festival (1995) and a solo exhibition about Memory at the Festival, the following year. In 1996, her Devon photographs won the prize for photographs at the International Festival of Ethnographic Film at the University of Kent.
Over a number of years, she has written and photographed, contributing to magazines such as Country Origins, the Farmer’s Weekly, Traditional Woodworking, Crafts, Country Living, NFU Countryside, Gardens Illustrated, Devon Life, the Dartmoor Magazine and also to the Daily Telegraph and the Independent. She has also written articles for academic journals and contributed to books.
In photography, her main interest has been in showing skills, both indoor and outdoor, which are becoming rare, so she has photographed such things as butter-making in Devon, pottery-making at Winchcombe, salmon-trap making near the River Severn, violet-growing in Cornwall and perry-making in Herefordshire. She also photographed daily life on a traditional Devon farm. In 2011, she combined with Hilary Burns, the basket-maker, to show ‘Tracing the Blueprint’, an exhibition about the historical path of indigo-printed textiles across the world, at the Guild of Devon Craftsmen at Bovey Tracey, and again at the Museum in the Park, Stroud, in 2014.