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This October British Textile Biennial (BTB) explores invention and innovation in textile production, through indigenous knowledge to space-age technology, from the earliest form of shelter, the tent, to space suits, and from plant-based dyes to the first polymers.
With artists and designers, BTB25 looks back to see how the textile pioneers of 20th century Lancashire were inspired by a bold vision of the future that revolutionised our lives, with companies such as Grenfell in Burnley creating innovative materials that clothed explorers and pioneers in extreme environments and new, synthetic fabrics such as Terylene made in Accrington that modernised ordinary lives with easy care clothing. However, these developments pushed the planet and our use of its resources to extremes so the innovation of the future must look at ways to reset it and learn from a distant past that is almost lost to us.
Used for millennia by communities worldwide, the tent represents one of humanity's most ancient, adaptable, and sustainable technologies. Evolving through generations of indigenous knowledge, today the tent is a stark emblem of our era, a testament to contemporary conflict and displacement and has been a recurring motif in the work of Lucy + Jorge Orta for over three decades.
In Blackburn Cathedral Crypt, a retrospective of the Ortas’ work is centred on a major new commission, exploring Bedouin vernacular and technology to reimagine the traditional Majlis: House of Hair, with a speculative response to nomadic living in the extreme scenario of mass desertification. Majlis: House of Hair is designed as a space for imagining possible futures, through technology, indigenous knowledge, resistance and community; showing how nomadic architecture can be mobilised as an agent of political transformation.
The aqal is a structure vital to Somali life, built to endure the harsh landscape with limited resources. Constructing one is a communal effort, with women weaving the structure together while singing songs that have been passed down through generations. Each aqal, thereforebecomes a tapestry of multiple hands, histories and sounds, reflecting the lives and dreams ofits creators. Blackburn Museum hosts The Aqal (House of Weaving Songs) by the Dhaqan Collective who have drawn on these traditional nomadic structures to co-create this interactive sound installation with Somali communities in Bristol and beyond, integrating weaving songs and woven tapestries into the structure to connect us to cultural practices that can inspire us to build new futures.
The festival finale exhibition is ‘FROM THE MOOR’ – a retrospective exhibition showcasing multi-disciplinary artist and fashion designer Aitor Throup’s groundbreaking designs, sculptures and drawings from the past 20 years. The immersive exhibition will take place at the Burnley Empire - an iconic Grade II listed Victorian theatre in the heart of the town. The historic venue has been out of use since 1995 and is considered “At Risk” by the Theatres Trust. Through their partnership, Aitor Throup and BTB will breathe new life into the iconic Grade II Listed building and shine a spotlight on the work to restore and reuse the large venue for modern use. A secondary smaller exhibition of Throup’s sculptures and drawings will take place at Gallery 123 - a building which originally housed the retail store where the young Throup was inspired by the works of Massimo Osti, namely the brands C.P. Company and Stone Island – two brands with whom Throup would later collaborate.
Pitting themselves against the elements in the most extreme environments, pioneers from Amelia Earhart to Edmund Hillary were clothed in high performance fabric made in Burnley. This is the story of how the North made the fabric of empire; then ripped it up and stitched it into something new. On the 50th anniversary of the 1975 British Mount Everest Southwest Face expedition, the exhibition Pioneers of the Material World World - From peak to precinct, summit to street at Towneley Hall, Burnley features original clothing across a century. From down jackets that helped climbers summit Everest to the first Gore-Tex, alongside vintage brochures, adverts and extraordinary photographs, charting the story of Lancashire’s key role in this clothing revolution right up to present day, including its part in creating Luke Skywalker’s X-wing pilot outfit. The exhibition shows how performance clothing emerged at the beginning of the last century in the service of empire, and was later redefined by northern climbers who, unable to afford elite gear, made their own, giving rise to brands like Berghaus, Craghoppers, Karrimor, Rab, Sprayway and Rohan, all rooted in northern ingenuity and Burnley’s material expertise. These garments were adopted by football fans who transformed them into terrace-style while ravers donned them in all-night sessions. Now they can be seen on high streets and gigs from Tokyo to Manchester - everyday statements of pride, defiance, and belonging.
The exhibition is presented in collaboration with the creators of the book, Mountain Style: British Outdoor Clothing 1953 - 2003, that celebrates the outsiders, the problem solvers and the mavericks. Those manufacturing pioneers and mountaineers who, from humble beginnings went further, faster and higher – setting the template for what we all wear in the outdoors and inadvertently creating style classics along the way.
The idea of creating Utopia fuelled the future visions of the men and women that conquered the sky, mountains and oceans in the last century, feeding the realms of science fiction and, in turn, being inspired by its creations. In Re: Fashion Challenge, a collaborative project between Gawthorpe Textiles Collection, UCLan and the British Textile Biennial, a team of school students will collaborate with mentors to develop a sci-fi inspired collection from discarded and recycled materials with the challenge of reusing discarded outdoor clothing and equipment. Ninon Ardisson will be in residence with Creative Spaces Burnley to investigate how high-performance textile innovation in the 20th century might have developed differently if informed by local environments rather than military-industrial demands or space exploration and how biological materials - biopolymers, fibres, mycelium, bioplastics - could have shaped a different trajectory for innovation, had their potential been recognised at the time.
As an early career artist, Alexis Maxwell responded to an open call in partnership with Pendle-based organisation In-Situ and supported by The Fenton Arts Trust, with a proposal to create an immersive, sci-fi-inspired installation exploring the speculative evolution of textiles, shaped by ecological memory and technological innovation. Through projection mapping and nature-inspired sculpture, the project will imagine future fabrics that grow, shift and hold memory, blurring the lines between the organic and the artificial, the natural and the woven.
The development of the first polyester Terylene in Accrington (1941) seemed to be the stuff of science fiction, inspiring films like The White Suit, while its mass adoption in the 1950s heralded a revolution in fabric composition and production which is captured in the exhibition, The Synthetic Revolution, curated by fashion historian and broadcaster Amber Butchart and artist Claire Wellesley-Smith at the Haworth Gallery. The impacts of this invention remain global and wide ranging and this exhibition charts how its invention transformed domestic labour and social life, fashion and cultural arenas and our environment today. Amber returns with the long running Cloth Cultures podcast exploring the stories behind this year’s biennial with invited artists, academics and specialist researchers.
Artist Ivan Forde has created new work for the Haworth Art Gallery in Accrington using pioneering fabric from Bionic Yarn. Headquartered in Costa Rica, Bionic Yarn is an innovative textile company that transforms plastic waste from the sea into durable hybrid textiles. Having partnered with numerous brands including Gore-Tex, Patagonia and Stone Island, while counting global superstar Pharrell Williams as an ambassador, Bionic Yarn invited Forde to collaborate for a presentation at the New York Cotton Exchange in 2023. Forde uses this material to depict new poetic visions of fictional and real bodies of water across the world. ETERNAL SEAS considers connections between, historic sites of manufacturing, synthetic textile innovation and trade in New York City, Northern England and beyond. Installed as hanging scrolls in the billiard room, the three works from an ongoing series of seascapes, are in conversation with the gallery’s 18th century oil painting “Storm Off The Coast” by Vernet, and their notable collection of Tiffany glass. The works are based on Forde’s current research into the forgotten mid-century glass mosaic technique, Gemmail which layered multi-coloured pieces of glass together with liquid enamel.
The Harris Museum and Art Gallery in Preston has an extensive archive devoted to the Courtauld Factory’s production of Rayon in the town and has commissioned Hannah Robson to make a monumental work that responds to that story in its impressive newly opened spaces. Hannah’s practice explores how the need to make textiles has shaped our social structures and the physical arrangements of our towns and cities. Hannah’s work will trace the evolution of Courtaulds to reflect the changes in textile making in the 20th Century; founded as a silkweaving factory, it became an internationally significant chemicals manufacturer through its investment in the burgeoning Rayon industry.
As we now know, the white heat of this technological revolution burnt out the planet and we face the consequences which today’s innovators are trying desperately to repair by reaching back to ancient knowledge of textile production which works in harmony with nature, and which still resides with indigenous people but is in danger of being forgotten.
Learning from the Land, at the Whitaker, brings together artists whose work reflects upon what nature teaches us and which man can so easily overlook or destroy. Dhara Mehrotra’s site-specific installation, Filamentous, supported by the British Council, celebrates mycelium networks that are the circulatory systems of earth. Found in the soil, mycelia are not only intelligent conduits of exchange within the ecosystems of landscape, but also are potentially revolutionary material of the future, offering a range of sustainable solutions in material manufacture.
Melanie Smith and Patricio Villarreal have made a film with a Mixtec community depicting the ancestral, sustainable dye harvesting from the plicopurpura pansa sea snail. In an age-old, seasonal ritual, members of a village make the journey to the coast to find the sea snail in orderto ‘milk’ its extraordinary purple dye in a gentle and respectful action that does no harm to the creature. The film is an elegy to the act, as both the ancestral knowledge and the snail are facing extinction under the pressures of climate change and tourism.
In an iteration of the exhibition, Sangre de Nopal, shown earlier this year at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Santa Barbara (MCASB), three artists of Mexican heritage explore the inextricable relationships between land, labour and body woven together over the centuries in textile production and exploited by colonial powers, in this case by the Spanish conquest of Mexico, illustrated in the story of cochineal.
Zapotec artist, Porfirio Gutiérrez maintains the ancestral practice of processing and dyeing with cochineal insects for his woven artworks, reinterpreting his inherited weaving language by subverting and re-imagining its symbols and forms to create a contemporary indigenous identity. Having crossed the American border on foot when he was 17, his work is a personal investigation into the process of migration, in which body, land, labour and ancestral knowledge are inextricable.
Rooted in specific geographies and territorial histories, Tania Candiani’s works engage with the pigment’s pre-colonial origins and its transformation through colonial systems of extraction and trade. They reflect on cochineal as a living archive - one that stains the skin, permeates the fabric, and carries the resonance of historical and cultural memory. The pieces investigate the act of dyeing as both a physical and conceptual gesture, revealing the entanglements between body, land, labour and ancestral knowledge. She has previously represented Mexico at the Venice Biennale.
Sarah Rosalena works between traditional craft traditions and emerging technology, breaking boundaries through her hybrid forms rooted in Indigenous cosmologies, re-interpreted through digital tools and her hand. Born from multi-generations of indigenous (Wixárika) womenweavers, Sarah works from her digital Jacquard loom to her mother’s bead loom, mixing hand-dyed natural colours, including cochineal and indigo, with a pixelated palette to produce her textiles. Her artworks touch on science fiction, addressing the dissolution of linear time and urging the viewer to recognize the ancient wisdom in indigenous technologies and their understanding of the cosmos, as exemplified in her recent residency at Mount Wilson Laboratory in L.A County.
The four woven pieces that form When Computers Were Women were developed from a residency at CERN (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research) by Crystal Bennes. She was struck by the resemblance of old computer programming punch cards produced by the former female ‘computers’ in the data centre there to the punch cards used in Jacquard looms and the invisibility of the female workforce. Bennes worked with an all-women weaving team at Dash & Miller in Bristol, to weave the four pieces shown at Queen Street Mill, Burnley alongside its 19th century Jacquard looms.
Weaving the Future is a multi-media installation by photographer and filmmaker Tim Smith exploring how the innovative spirit that powered the textile industry over the last three centuries is driving a new revolution for the 21st century. Set against the backdrop of cards that manually ‘programmed’ the Jacquard looms in Queen Street Mill, Tim collaborates with musicians and performers to explore the link between the analogue and digital worlds.
A revolutionary process for the extrusion of molten plastic into mesh structures was invented by Brian Mercer in Blackburn in the 1960s. Branded as Netlon it was sold world-wide and further development resulted in the invention of Tensar, a plastic grid as strong as steel which is widely used within civil engineering and still manufactured in the town. Inspired by this futuristic inventiveness, artist Jamie Holman, is working with young people at Blackburn Youth Zone to create a film which will be shown on a state-of-the-art screen built into the fabulous new extension of the building, the Fuse Box.
Another Blackburn inventor will be celebrated by Christian Jeffery at the historic hall, Turton Tower, which came into the ownership of James Kay in 1835. Kay developed a successful wet spinning process for flax in 1824, helping industrialise linen spinning in the UK. His grandson, John, went to Harrow School in 1870 and brought the school's form of football back with him to the local village team, founding what was arguably the first football club. Christian Jeffery has been invited to create a football shirt that celebrates these interlocked histories. Formerly a lead designer for adidas football, Jeffery has seamlessly woven his love for football and his passion for textiles into a career that defies conventional boundaries.
Flax and football both sit at the heart of the textile history of Lancashire, as they do in Northern France. åbäke & Le Cercle du S226 erpent bleu is exploring these two strands with museums and communities here and in Roubaix, through a commission supported by the British Council. BTB reaches Lancaster for the first time with Margo Selby’s beautiful textile hanging, Breathing Colour, made in an Art in Manufacturing residency at Standfast & Barracks, renowned for their impressive heritage of textile printing as well as their ground-breaking digital inkjet technology. Shown in the magnificent Ashton Memorial, the installation is accompanied by a sound piece by composer artist, Peter Coyte that incorporates traces of a factory brass band. A co-commission by The National Festival of Making and British Textile Biennial.
Three early career artists from Venture Arts, Manchester have developed new work in responseto BTB25 which will be presented in various venues: Sally Hirst presents a solo exhibition at Helmshore Mill exploring histories of disability within mill worker communities and contrasting the Luddite movement with contemporary concerns around AI technologies.
Sarah Lee presents an epic embroidery work exploring histories of Lancashire companies producing high performance fabrics and their relationship with science fiction. Emilia Hewitt undertakes a summer residency at the Whitaker to develop work responding to the Learning from the Land theme within her photographic and print making practice.
Textile Culture Net (TCN) – an international network of four textile institutions: Central Museum of Textiles Łódź, Poland, Lottozero Prato, Italy, Textiel Museum Tilburg, The Netherlands, CHAT- Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textie, Hong Kong – continues its mission to explore new curatorial approaches and broaden access to textile art through digital platforms. For BTB25, TCN partners and guest curators Caroline Kipp (USA), Bukola Oyebode (Nigeria/The Netherlands), Zoe Yah (Taiwan) and Hilde Skancke Pedersen (Norway/Sámi) respond to the themes of BTB. Presented as an online exhibition via Instagram under #TextileCultureNet, it spotlights diverse voices and innovative practices in textile design and heritage.
Future Fashion Landscapes showcases a collaboration between the Centre for Sustainable Fashion, University of the Arts London and the South East England and South West England Fibresheds, focusing on fibre production and the biodiversity enhancement potential of farms adopting regenerative principles. The exhibition brings together the results of collaborations between farmers and designers exploring how we could shift from landscapes being exploited to satisfy the whims of fashion, to allowing local landscapes to inform and inspire what we design and wear.
Woven Worlds, Salford Slow Fashion (UK) and IGC Fashion (Uganda) have created a distinctive fashion collection that celebrates bark cloth - an ancient and culturally significant Ugandan fabric. Godfrey Katende of IGC Fashion is leading vital work to revive and modernise bark cloth. The final collection will feature two outfits - one to be showcased in Uganda, the other in the UK. One garment is made from cotton naturally dyed using bark cloth and rust sourced from the infrastructure of historic Lancashire cotton mills. The second is a quilted jacket crafted with bark cloth and repurposed textiles from Owino Market in Kampala and Oxfam in Manchester.
Re: Fashion Challenge is a project by Gawthorpe Textiles Collection, University of Lancashire and BTB. Teams of young people collaborate with fashion mentors to develop collections from second-hand clothes, dead stock, discarded and recycled materials. This year’s challenge will focus on re-using old outdoor clothing and equipment to develop sci fi themed collections. As in previous years, BTB25 will present its exhibitions, installations and performances in former mills and other rarely accessible spaces created by the textile industry across the centuries. Once again, major artists will be given the opportunity to make new work on a grand scale, as Lubaina Himid, Christine Borland and Jasleen Kaur have done in the past.
The 2025 British Textile Biennial runs from 2 October - 2 November 2025
Visit www.britishtextilebiennial.co.uk
