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Another Peace

As a site-specific installation Another Peace explored the shared histories and legacies of cotton manufacture in Lancashire and Gujarat (it took its title from the name of the Steam engine at Queen St. Mill, Peace). The installation was the outcome of research undertaken within the Cotton Exchange project, which operated within the context of a larger collaborative project, Global Threads, one of the strands of the Cultural Olympiad project Stories of the World.

The award of a Cotton Exchange residency enabled a research visit to Ahmedabad to gain insights into the decline of the cotton textile industry in Gujarat and to examine its parallels with Lancashire. This was followed up by research within the archives of Lancashire Museums, specifically Queen St. Mill in Burnley.

Another Peace builds on collaborative research methods developed in earlier projects. A series of over-long shirt-forms were commissioned from specialist tailors in Gujarat and Lancashire, and made from fabrics sourced in India, bearing the commercial stamps and printed labels that document their manufacture and trade. These shirt-forms were interspersed between the weaving loom ‘heels’ hanging from the ceiling of the spinning shed at Queen St. Mill. The translucent and ghost-like shirt-forms embodied ‘memories’ of garments worn by the cotton mill workers of Ahmedabad and Burnley, emphasising the absence of human presence in the contemporary textile mill environment, common to both Lancashire and Gujarat.

The work was installed in the strategic location of Queen St. Mill Museum, June- September 2012, and further exhibited in Rajnagar Cotton Mill, an equivalent ‘post-industrial’ location in Ahmedabad in April 2013. (This exhibition was the opening event of UNESCO World Heritage day, 18th April 2013.)