The focus of this year’s British Textile Biennial is the global nature of textiles and the relationships they create, both historically and in the present day:
“The story of textiles is the story of labour, trade and power, weaving a complex web around the world.”
Jamie Holman, Head of Fine Art, Blackburn College. Conversations in Creativity.
Three exhibits which have touched me personally have been displayed at Queen Street Mill in Burnley, the last surviving 19th century weaving mill in the world.
The mill is the most appropriate of settings for these artists to display their work as the mill provides relevancy to it, complementing and enhancing the work.
Brigid McLeer’s work “Collateral” was inspired by a lace panel in the Gawthorpe Textile Collection that was created to commemorate the Battle of Britain. She worked with local embroiderers to create her new panel, to remember the lives lost in mills, factories and fast fashion clothing companies across the world that have been destroyed by fire, negligence and a lack of Health and Safety rules.
The story behind the work has a special significance for me.
My paternal great grandfather was an Overlooker at Whittlefield Mill. As a result of poor Health & Safety practices, he sustained a serious back injury in the mill and was unable to work; neither could he afford a doctor or “bonesetter”. He received no compensation for his injury and died weeks later at the age of 42, days before his youngest child was born. Two months later his wife died in a smallpox epidemic aged 40, leaving my father’s sixteen-year-old mother to bring up her six brothers and sisters.
The central panel of the work depicts the trade routes taken by container ships transporting goods around the world. The edge panels depict 14 factories that have burnt or fallen down from the UK in the early twentieth century to Thailand and India, killing 2265 workers. The panel is edged by bodies wrapped up in shrouds, as they often are at the scenes of such tragedies. Each shroud was made individually by 27 embroiderers who responded to a public call-out. All said that this simple act of giving time, labour and care allowed them to think of the lives needlessly lost and pay their respects. I find the collaborative element makes the work extremely powerful.
The exhibit was accompanied by a moving film of a female textile worker from Bangladesh who is a survivor of a factory fire, describing the poor working conditions of the factory workers and the fire during which many lives were lost. I found Brigid McLeer’s work to be beautiful and profoundly moving; the endless rows of quiet looms in the mill providing a chilling setting.
“Shabnam” by Reetu Sattar
This film explores the historic and continuing relationship between East Lancashire and Bangladesh in a textile tug-of-war, starting with the delicate muslin made in Dhaka in the 17th and 18th centuries, highly prized by the British fashion market, through to the migration of textile workers to Lancashire in the 20th century and back to the present-day workers in the same city in Bangladesh.
In 1765 the young Mughal emperor, Shah Alam, was defeated by East India troops and forced to sign a treaty – we would class this today as an act of involuntary privatisation. Shah Alam’s revenue officials in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa were replaced by English traders appointed by Robert Clive, the new Governor of Bengal and within months Bengal was pillaged by the East India Company. The wealth was rapidly drained into Britain, much of it directly into Clive’s pocket!
Benjamin West’s painting of the handing over of the treaty by Shah Alam to Clive
I have a deep personal connection to Bangladesh. I began teaching in the early seventies within a community of newly arriving families from Bangladesh and Pakistan. The men came to Lancashire on a free “ticket” to work in the textile industry in Burnley and the surrounding areas. Once the men were established with jobs and homes, their families followed. Most of the Bangladeshi families in Burnley came from the Sylhet area of Bangladesh in the wake of the War of Independence of 1971. (There is archive footage in Clitheroe Castle of recordings made by the families as they recalled their experiences of migration and settlement.) I spent over thirty years teaching in the Stoneyholme community in Burnley and it has been my privilege to watch generations of Bangladeshi families grow and change.
I have spent time in Bangladesh, visiting schools and communities in both Dhaka, Sylhet and the rural areas close to the Indian border, witnessing at first hand the conditions in which many of the local people live and work, hence my interest in this piece of film making.
The film is beautifully made, and the images are riveting to watch. To my disappointment, however, the commentary is in Bengali with NO SUBTITLES. The vast majority of the viewers do not speak or understand Bengali and although it is only fitting that mother tongue is spoken in the film, subtitles would have obviously engaged the viewers more fully.
Sharon Brown “Stitched Histories”
Queen Street Mill is once again a perfect setting for the work of Sharon Brown, who uses freehand machine embroidery to reimagine found letters and documents connected to the history and workers of Lancashire cotton mills. The freehand process allows each piece to take on a life of its own, in turn celebrating fragments of lives spent working in the textile industry.
The documents Sharon uses have been found on market stalls and, even though they have been discarded, she feels a sense of responsibility as she works with them to give them a new purpose. These handwritten fragile papers reveal not only personal histories but also glimpses of global events and the social and cultural context in which they were written.
Sharon was working at her sewing machine when I visited the mill and it was an interesting experience to watch her. I asked how long it takes her to create a piece of work and was not surprised to hear that she can spend anywhere between six months and two years on a piece as the work is so intricate and delicate, the fragility of the paper dictating how much she stitches and how much she leaves bare. Many of her letters and documents were found in a Rochdale mill and as she read some of them, the people came alive for her. I find her work to be a moving act of respect and remembrance.
Sharon’s work struck a chord with me as I have letters, postcards and photographs of my family dating back to the early 1900’s when they lived and worked on their smallholding. As part of my project, I would like to display some of these to complement my birch tree installation, demonstrating my sense of place and time.
Lubaina Himid “Lost Threads”
This entry in my reflective journal would not be complete without reviewing the work of Lubaina Himid. In this major new work, rivers of Dutch Wax prints, seen as quintessentially African, cascade to reflect the movement of oceans and rivers that have been used to transport cotton over the centuries across the planet.
Waterways transported raw cotton, spun yarn, and woven textiles from continent to continent, as well as enslaved people from Africa to pick raw cotton in the southern states of America or workers who migrated from South Asia to operate looms in Europe. Through the epic space of the Great Barn at Gawthorpe Hall, they question the complex historical and contemporary relationships between Europe and Africa.
The Dutch prints were made by Dutch colonial companies attempting to mechanically reproduce handmade Javanese batik cloth. This failed to sell in Southeast Asia, so the Dutch traders took it to West Africa, where the patterns were modified locally and became extremely popular. Today, however, the designs are low-cost reproductions made in China. These are the fabrics used in “Lost Threads” which leads the artist to question the role of colonisation in the formation of cultural stereotypes.
The Great Barn is the perfect setting for such magnificent swathes of cloth; the atmosphere in the barn was hushed (due to roosting bats) and people whispered to one another in the dimmed barn. The experience was almost cathedral-like as the awed viewers moved quietly amongst the fabrics.
This thought-provoking work has emphasised once more the importance of not simply the work of the artist but the manner and location in which it is displayed, something to keep at the forefront of my mind when considering how to present my own work in the future.
“Lost Threads” by Lubaina Himid
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