Titled ‘The Warp, The Weft, The Wake’, my 20/20 proposal built on existing research within my practice around the afterlives of slavery, as articulated by cultural theorist Christina Sharpe in her framing of the “wake” – life lived in the aftermath of slavery as grief; as state of watchfulness; as aftermath. It also took as a starting point words spoken by African-American abolitionist Sarah Parker Remond, who visited Manchester & spoke at The Athenaeum – which now forms part of Manchester Art Gallery’s footprint – as part of a tour of Britain in 1859. In a manifestation of Sharpe’s “wake”, Remond’s words reverberate into the present: “not one cent of the money ever reached the hands of the labourers” – still rings true; raising questions around reparations, and continued practices of exploitative labour within structures of capitalist production.

I wanted to take these provocations as a starting point for considering legacies of expansionism, colonialism and exploitative labour inherent to the material history of cotton; thinking about this in dialogue with Manchester Art Gallery’s costume & textiles collection, which resides at their partner gallery Platt Hall. I was interested in how some of these objects in the collection connect to the cotton industry that fuelled the growth of the city, which in many ways funded the institution. I wanted to think carefully about histories of site, channelling some of the strategies of institutional critique in speaking back to these histories of place; with reference to The Athenaeum as speakers’ hall, The Royal Manchester Institution – the gallery’s institutional fore-runner – funded by city’s elite, merchants, and industry owners, and Platt Hall built by a textile merchant and now housing the gallery’s textile and costume collections.

Over the course of monthly visits to Manchester between July – October 2023, I was able to view a wide range of the material in Manchester Art Gallery’s collection; across the main gallery, storage holdings at Queens House, and museum of dress Platt Hall. I found a real breadth of possible entry-points, both directly connected, and adjacent to, my original research proposal. However, I was most drawn to a collection of un-accessioned pattern books on the peripheries of the gallery’s collection, alongside patchworks, and the dress collection. I felt these objects held space for intersecting lines of enquiry, drawing together my interest in the discipline of print, intimate and haptic relationships to cloth, and material memory pertaining to labour and cultural influence, and appropriation.

My research also took me beyond the Manchester Art Gallery collection, with local research trips to view RMI subscribers’ records at Manchester Central Library & Local History Archive; an exhibition titled ‘Founders and Funders’ at John Rylands Library looking at connections between University of Manchester’s founders and finances garnered from transatlantic slavery; textile industry photographs & pattern books at The Science & Industry Museum Archive; pattern books and cotton samples at The Whitworth Archive; and the British Textile Biennale & a corresponding conference at Manchester School of Art.

During my R&D period I was able to draw on a wealth of knowledge from museum staff, through cross-departmental conversations with a range of curators based across MAG & Platt Hall, as well as community engagement team-members across both sites. This led to us hosting some craft & oral history workshops with local people involved in Platt Hall’s programming, and from local community organisation 422 Arts earlier this year. Though these sessions, I hoped to bring in a range of voices to think about the material from an everyday personal perspective and collectively explore histories of the material, while also thinking about these narratives in relation to how they might be experienced in the gallery. Audio recordings from these sessions has fed into the development of the artwork.

I also worked with Manchester-based initiative Global Threads – a collaboration between UCL and the Science & Industry Museum. Here, I worked closely with Matthew Stallard, with input from Katie Belshaw, to recruit and support three early-career researchers to undertake three areas of study, linked to the two institutions that are key to the establishment of MAG as we know it today. Ella Sinclair used newspaper databased to research activities taking place in The Athenaeum in the same year that Remond delivered her speech; exploring the wider context this abolitionist discourse was entering into. Destinie Reynolds and Serena Robinson took names of individuals who were either founding subscribers of the Royal Manchester Institution, or on the first board of the Athenaeum, as starting points for identifying connections between some of these names and exploitative and enslaved labour. Destinie looked at the experience of enslaved and former-enslaved people on South Carolina’s Edisto Island, a key producer of Sea Island cotton and a noted area supplying Manchester textile manufactory McConnell & Kennedy, business of William McConnell who is noted on the Athenaeum’s first Board. Serena made a trip to Cambridge to view the records of Hillsborough Estate, in Dominica; a plantation owned by the Greg family, who also ran the renowned Quarry Bank Mill in Styal just south of Manchester, and who were significant donors to Manchester Art Gallery’s collection. Some of the cotton produced on the mill would have been sent abroad to clothe enslaved labourers, who in turn worked to generate further profits for the plantations’ owners. All three researchers have written up blog posts, which can be accessed through the Global Threads website.

Central to this research was the desire to identify archival information that spoke of the lives of enslaved people, whose labour ultimately in part financed the establishment of many Manchester Art Gallery, through the wealth generated for and gifted by early subscribers. It aimed to name some of those who’s contributions go largely unrecognised in the RMI ledgers. More can also be said about the experience of local industrial labourers, and the harsh conditions for workers during this period of accelerated capital growth and cotton boom. Their names are also notably absent from these documents.

In response to this research, I’ve been working towards a number of outcomes, which ultimately will take the form of a costume and a museum tour-style work – through audio & possibly performance. In developing the work, I found it helpful to return to key concerns within my practice around materials and how they hold memory and tell stories, and to think about how these histories reverberate into the present. Ideas around craft and design, text and citation, duplication and acceleration, have also remained important considerations for me.

The silhouette of the costume I have been developing is based on a dress worn by Sarah Parker Remond. There are three print designs for the fabric, and these are lifted from a combination of sources. One of these is a rare surviving example of woven Manchester check, also known as ‘Guinea cloth’ – cheaply produced cloth often for sale to West African markets in exchange for goods, including enslaved people. Stumbling across these unassuming woven samples, hiding in plain sight among a run of print swatches, felt like an important discovery; and threw up questions around cataloguing and accessioning: how can we know where these things are kept / how do we make them available for reference? I was also interested in the resemblance of the check print to the grid that bound the names of the RMI subscribers in the institution’s ledgers, and to other lists of itemised names, and records. I liked the idea of the costume taking on the expanded form of one of these books, with the other selected prints lifted from end papers from these same ledgers – of using this format not only to highlight the names of those whose money was assigned to the founding of the institution, but also to signpost towards the names that are not included; and to think about whose labour facilitates the wealth that was then invested into the institution.

Alongside this, the project has offered an opportunity for me to reflect on the possibility of sharing skills cross-generationally, with the potential to collaborate and learn from my mother, Jennifer Graham, who has a career background as a costumier. Over the past month, she has joined me in my studio and has been working to fabricate the dress. Although it is based on my initial dress design, the development of it has been collaborative; with my mum suggesting a range of undergarments, and consulting on historical accuracy, strength and robustness of materials, practical considerations for wearing the costume. We are in constant dialogue about approaches towards embodying the concept and bringing the design to life. And I have been documenting the process, through photographs and video; which offers another potential project outcome.

The combination of research residency and commissioning opportunity has felt incredibly generative, and has led to the development of a number of different artwork outcomes. The next step will be a process of deciding in dialogue with Manchester Art Gallery, what to select for acquisition into the collection. This will be my first experience of navigating acquisition of work into a national collection, and I imagine it will be a useful learning opportunity. I’ve been grateful to the UAL team for their support and guidance throughout the project, to the MAG and Platt teams for their welcome and generosity in facilitating my research, and to all of the other wonderful individuals mentioned throughout this text who I’ve been privileged to collaborate with.

Further Reading from Global Threads:

Edisto Island & McConnell & Kennedy: The invisibilised labour behind Manchester’s mills, by Destinie Reynolds

Culture, Cotton, and Wealth: The Manchester Athenaeum in 1859, by Ella Sinclair

Hillsborough & Manchester: Tracing profits and recovering lives in the archive, by Serena Robinson