Gallery Oldham celebrates women at work in powerful new exhibition

From 17 January to 9 May, Gallery Oldham will hang no ordinary faces on its walls. Instead, stethoscopes, bee-smokers and pruning saws will stand in for features, telling the story of women who shaped trades long credited to men.

Artist Charlotte Hodes spent months in the 160-acre Northern Roots site off Broadway, watching beekeepers, gardeners and foresters at work. Their tools, and those of Oldham's lost hatting trade, became the starting points for life-size papercuts and glazed ceramic vases that fill the Greaves Street gallery.

The show is laid out like a mind-map rather than a timeline, so visitors bump into Dr Olive Clayden, Oldham's first female GP, next to present-day hive-builder Damson Tregaskis. Hodes says she wanted the jolt: 'History isn't a straight line; it's a set of conversations we're still having.

Entry is free, and the gallery keeps late hours on Thursdays so shift workers can catch it. Schools have been offered print-and-cut workshops, and Northern Roots volunteers will run a pop-up plant stall in the foyer each Saturday, letting people handle the same tools Hodes turned into art.

No ticket is needed, but numbers will be capped on busy days to stop the delicate papercuts being damaged by breath and body heat. That fragility is part of the point, Hodes says: 'Work done by women's hands has always been powerful, and always at risk of being erased.