Exhibitions

Here you’ll find our digital exhibitions and stories; shared and curated by artists, academics and community curators – see how others are engaging with amazing textile heritage objects across Lancashire.

Password protected exhibitions allow us to work collaboratively on them while we create and upload the content ready for the finished exhibition to be made public. If you click on an exhibition and it asks for a password please be patient and check back soon to see the final exhibition once it is shared.

Re:Fashion Challenge 2023

The Re: Fashion challenge aims to teach young people the skills needed to make and adapt clothes in an effort to tackle fast fashion and embrace a more conscious and sustainable approach to garment production.

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Ringing the Changes

Community Curator Anne Cochrane explores the entries in a telephone index from Queen Street Mill; revealing both local and international links within the textile industry.

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Threadbare Narratives

In this digital exhibition artist Madhu Manipatruni explores the story of chintz and shares her own artwork as well as work created through block printing and embroidery community workshops held at Queen Street Mill alongside items researched at several museum collections that inspired her work.

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The Footwear Industry Shaped Me

Artist Sharon Brown presents archival materials, embroidery and digital collages that explore and capture the personal experiences and memories of a Lancashire community’s industrial textile heritage.

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Exploring Ecclesiastical Textiles

Researcher Esther Rollinson explores three intricately worked ecclesiastical textiles in detail; using digital microscope images to reveal the materials and technical skill with which they have been created.

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Modest Fashion with Olive High School & Burnley Boys and Girls Club

GTC worked with Olive High School and Burnley Boys and Girls Club to deliver a project about modest clothing linked to the heritage textiles held in the Gawthorpe Textiles Collection. The brief was for the Olive High students to develop design drawings for modest sportswear.

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Chamba Rumals

A partnership between Gawthorpe Textiles Collection and Dr Rohini Arora to give an in depth look at two rare and precious examples of embroidery from the Chamba region of India.

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Skilled, Responsible & Hardworking

Academic research by Gill Crawshaw focusing on the stories of Lancashire's disabled cotton workers.

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Global Threads: African Fashion

A collection of fashion forward garments designed and made by first year Fashion Design students at UCLan drawing inspiration from traditional African and African Export textiles in the Gawthorpe Textiles Collection.

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Cloth Cultures Season 2

Join Fashion Historian Amber Butchart for a series of podcasts showcasing some amazing objects from six different Lancashire museums and collections.

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Rhythm of The Looms by Scott Robertson and Janet Swan

A soundscape combining mill sounds from Queen Street Mill with the poetry of "mill girl" Ethel Carnie Holdsworth.

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Siri, stop the patriarchy

A digital zine by artist Emily Simpson looking at feminism, gender equality, our rights to protest and what feminism means to the artist as a non-binary person.

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