The Lancashire landscape and its inhabitants are shaped by the industry that grew over two centuries and has now all but disappeared, leaving an indelible mark on people and places. Using the sites and spaces left by the textile industry, including the Cotton Exchange in Blackburn, as inspiration, context, and venue, we might ask: can making textiles be regenerative? In response, artists from around the world present sustainable relationships between the land, the people who live on it, and the textiles that come from it, investigating pre-industrial models from homegrown, handspun flax in Blackburn to cotton production in Benin. We trace the routes of fibres and fabrics across centuries to and from the north of England, from the so-called “slave cloth,” spun and woven by hand on the Pennine Moors, to the bales of used fast fashion that make their way from British High Streets to the markets and toxic mountains of waste in West Africa.
