The Warp / The Weft / The Wake

This presentation will provide an overview of ‘The Warp / The Weft / The Wake’ by Holly Graham – a new commissioned costume artwork and exhibition currently on year-long display at Manchester Art Gallery; and the outcome of a 15-month residency responding to the gallery’s textile and costume collections.

The commission forms part of ‘20/20’, a project initiated by UAL’s Decolonising Art Institute, aiming to invite decolonial critical discourse in institutionarl collections and to diversify artist representation within them.

The work draws on cultural theorist Christina Sharpe’s framing of ‘the wake’ as aftermath, to consider legacies of expansionism, colonialism and exploitative labour inherent to the material history of cotton. The artwork references a speech delivered by African-American abolitionist Sarah Parker-Remond in one of the building’s gallery spaces in 1859. In a manifestation of Sharpe’s “wake”, Parker-Remond’s assertion that “not one cent of the money ever reached the hands of the labourers” reverberates into the present – what does reparative justice looks like within cultural heritage institutions?

With this in mind, the work channels strategies of institutional critique; speaking back to histories of site with reference to The Athenaeum as speakers’ hall, The Royal Manchester Institution funded by city merchants and industrialists, and Platt Hall built by a textile merchant. Research involved study of un-accessioned pattern books on the peripheries of the gallery’s collection, cross-departmental conversations with curators, dialogue with local people through craft and oral history workshops, and collaboration with early-career researchers through Manchester initiative Global Threads (UCL, Science & Industry Museum).