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Clocking On

Clocking On was the outcome of a research residency undertaken within the Cotton Exchange project, which examined the social, cultural and historical legacies of cotton manufacture and trade in North West England and North West India. (Cotton Exchange operated within the context of a larger collaborative project, Global Threads, one of the Cultural Olympiad Stories of the World.)

The Cotton Exchange residency began with a curatorial research visit to Ahmedabad, Bhuj and the textile villages of Kachcch, to gain insights into the status of the cotton textile industry in Gujarat, and examine the parallels with Lancashire. This was followed by archival research within Lancashire Museums, specifically at Queen St. Mill Museum, Burnley.

The project culminated in an installation piece Clocking On which explored the human legacy of cotton manufacture in Lancashire and Gujarat. Clocking On made connections with the lives and experiences of individual workers through a focus on artefacts of common and daily use. An installation of 100 billy-cans and tiffin boxes recreated the circular format of the workers’ clocking-on machine. The installation was made of slip-cast ceramic forms, echoing the ceramic numbers of the clocking-on machine, each of which was personalised using digitally printed imagery (text, numbers and documents) sampled from the archives at Queen St Mill, together with images sourced and collected in Gujarat.

The work was first exhibited at Queen St. Mill Museum, Burnley (June 2012). Working in collaboration with Ahmedabad University Centre for Heritage Management, an expanded version of the Cotton Exchange exhibition was subsequently re-shown at Rajnagar Mill, an equivalent post-industrial location in Ahmedabad. This exhibition was the opening event of UNESCO World Heritage day, 18th April 2013.

The project was featured in Material Memory (Ceramic Review, Issue 257) and in the exhibition publication Cotton Exchange: A Material Response (2013).