T HE word "therbligs" is an invented one coined to denote physical action which had previously gone largely unstudied – that of manual workers achieving tasks through repetitive movements.
Thus, a worker who tests a light bulb may perform at least six therbligs – reaching, grasping, holding, using, inspecting and releasing. Then the next light bulb arrives and the tasks are repeated.
The word was devised by American time-and-motion-study pioneers Lillian and Frank Gilbreth – therblig is their name backwards – a century ago as a means of reducing movements so as to improve the overall efficiency of industrial production.
Used ironically, since so much manual labour has today been replaced by machinery and computers, the word is also the title of a new exhibition at the New Art Exchange where one of the UK's biggest toilet paper factories is the subject of work by photographers' collective Wideyed.
Yes, you read that correctly: in fact the SCA factory in Northumberland produced around 800 million toilet rolls a year.
This accounts for one in five of the toilet rolls used in Britain.
And not only does this show take us through the production process, it also features a huge roll of white toilet paper, which has been rigged up like a tent and in which a repetitive film about the factory is being shown.
It's quite fun. As someone has written in the gallery visitors' book: "Fascinating. Love the bog roll for giants." Alas, while one can see the universal appeal of anything to do with toilet paper – or tissue, if you want to be delicate about it – a factory which makes it does not appear to be the best place to make a photographic study of, erm, physical motions.
Through the lens of Wideyed, the factory is clean, polished and as anonymous inside as its blank box-like exterior suggests.
Most photographs are of factory rooms, architecture and visually impressive mechanical processes rather than of the 400 workers.
But surely there's the irony of the title since so many of the movements of workers have been replaced by machines over the past 100 years – and the performance of those machines are now monitored by people using cameras and lenses.
Yet for all the evident industrial-scale impersonality of the factory, photographers Lucy Carolan and Richard Glynn manage to work a human intimacy into the process.