Textile & Place Conference: Manchester School of Art

The Textile and Place Conference was first held in 2018, curated by Alice Kettle and hosted by Manchester School of Art, in collaboration with The Whitworth Gallery. It drew on Manchester’s rich industrial heritage alongside its contemporary associations with textiles and place.

Textiles, as socially dynamic, communicative, and active materials, offer a rich field of inquiry into how they shape and reflect the ways we live. The conference explored how textiles connect to place through histories of production, sustainable futures, and narratives of migration, sociability, and politics.

It examined how textiles describe and map places through traditional making practices, memory, and site-specific or community-based work. Textiles were considered as carriers of stories—of trade, cultural exchange, migration, and postcolonial experience—embedded within both their materiality and methods of production. The notion of “politics” was understood broadly, encompassing how textiles are situated within specific places, how they mediate relationships between groups and organisations, and how they can challenge structures of power. In this way, textiles can both anchor us to place and act as agents of change.

The conference also investigated how textiles foster connections between communities, function as a medium for protest, engage with alternative narratives, and participate in systems of production and environmental concern. These discussions were grounded in Manchester’s textile legacy and shaped by the social and political contexts of the time.

In 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic, an online edition of the conference was curated by Alice Kettle in partnership with the British Textile Biennial. The conference returned to an in-person format in 2023.

Following the conference in 2018, Alice Kettle contributed to the Textile, Cloth & Culture journal with an article entitled Textile & Place. Following the 2023 conference, she edited

a special edition of the Textile, Cloth & Culture Journal focused on Textile & Place.