Cotton Exchange: Material Responses: GROUP EXHIBITION
An Exchange between India and the UK

Cotton Exchange was a project that ran over two years, involving 13 artists from the UK and India who exchanged ideas and travelled to each other’s cities. The project explored the heritage of the cotton industry and the historical links between Lancashire and Manchester in the UK, and Ahmedabad and Gujarat in India.

In 2012, the first Material Responses exhibition was presented at Queen Street Mill, Burnley, UK. It comprised a series of thought-provoking installations by artists, set among the machinery and historical fabric of the mill. Alice Kettle used cotton thread to articulate a language of making that linked the lives of the weavers at Queen Street Mill with those of textile makers in India, particularly embroiderers.

Within Queen Street Mill, Kettle discovered original ‘rules and regulations’ notices that once defined the rhythms and hardships of industrial labour. In response, she created new ‘notices’ by inviting women from villages in Kutch to define their own rules of life through textiles, drawing on inherited traditions of pattern and making. Their reflections, recorded through interpreter Judy Frater, were expressed using symbolic motifs: butterflies representing freedom, flowers suggesting joy, a yoke signifying tradition and identity, a flowering vine expressing continuity, and a mango embodying life’s shifting sweetness and value.

These contemporary voices were echoed by stitched testimonies from Queen Street Mill, drawn from mill ledgers and shared with Kettle by Margaret Nowak. The words recalled the sensory and emotional realities of mill life, from the deafening noise of the looms to the lingering smell of the size room, where carcasses were boiled to produce a cheap, gluey thickener. Together, they preserved memories of labour, loss, and making.

Some of these words also appeared in a series of shaft-loom belts, which historically linked the steam engine at Queen Street Mill to each individual loom. Alice Kettle used contemporary digital embroidery to pattern these belts—once a technology of industrial steam production—with images drawn from the mill, from India, from the block printers Barron and Larcher, and from the writings of Gandhi. The belts brought together a hybrid language of pattern, philosophy, culture, exchange, and production.

The final works took the form of three chandeliers, conceived as metaphors for illumination during night-time labour. One, white and neutral, was made from pirns from Queen Street Mill, strung onto a metal chandelier. A second, richly coloured, was constructed from wooden pirns from India. The third was made from paper pirns produced using paper from the Gandhi Ashram.

The following year, a second exhibition was installed in the dramatic environment of the former Rajnagar Mill in Ahmedabad. Featuring installations, textiles, ceramics, photography, and film, the exhibition reflected on the shared heritage of Ahmedabad and Manchester. The works led viewers on a journey through the spaces and memories of the mill, offering thoughtful and imaginative responses that prompted reflection on how heritage can be valued and reimagined to shape creative futures.

The project was made possible through a partnership between the Centre for Heritage Management at Ahmedabad University and the Manchester Institute for Research in Art and Design, Manchester School of Art at Manchester Metropolitan University, in association with National Textile Corporation Ltd. (a Government of India undertaking).