Cotton: Labour, Land and Body is an exhibition at the Crafts Council Gallery in London on until 4th March 2023 that uncovers stories around cotton that are rarely told.

"From the time of administrative control under the East India Company to British sovereign rule, the Indian subcontinent was exploited for profit. The land's rich and fertile soil grew crops like cotton in abundance and as international demand for cotton advanced, its value soared alongside its production."

This post looks at some of the works on show, along with additional resources on cotton for you to check out.

The exhibition - supported by the Bagri foundation and in partnership with The Super Slow Way, British Textile Biennial and the National Festival of Making - shows such artefacts as Gandhi's visit to a Lancashire textile mill in 1931 captured on film with stories of locals, and a fabric sample book showing the best quality Indian textiles along with fabrics from wider colonies of the British Empire including Pakistan, Bangladesh, parts of Uzbekistan and Nepal. Art pieces include a handweaving of an encoded Bangla alphabet, and an embroidered tableau of garment factory devastations from 1818 through to 2021.

It portrays the lesser known stories of cotton production of separation and migration, and of resistance and value. It opens and directs the conversation towards the full picture; how one action created another created another and so on. And frankly all under the rule of Britain. Though it doesn't use the word slavery anywhere in the exhibition that I could see, you feel this embedded in the recollections of fighting for independence, to working conditions, to loss of language. We constantly have to learn and unlearn and relearn as more is uncovered.

Quality Indian textiles became increasingly fashionable during the Empire, to the extent that they threatened the British wool and linen businesses, resulting in Parliament banning their importation and sale in the early 18th century. Meanwhile, advances in mechanised spinning and weaving enabled Britain to produce its own woven cotton, thereby disabling the development of India’s handloom industry. ~ Words from the exhibition guide.

Khadi.

The first piece on show is a film curated by artist Bharti Parmar, a visual artist and academic living and working in the UK. She has a particular interest in vernacular crafts and systems (rural, ethnic, indigenous, ancestral, local) which she often subverts to make political statements using a variety of formats ranging from print, photographic installation, sculpture to embroidery.

Khadi is a term applied to hand-spun and hand-woven cloth in India (of a particular weight and of cotton only), that was championed by Mahatma Gandhi as part of the national movement for independence. Parmar’s installation Khadi features a film as mentioned, and geometrically-punched khadi paper made from recycled cotton t-shirts in frames.

Lancashire had the optimum conditions for a cotton explosion; a climate that prevented the cotton fibres splitting, water sources to power the mills that ran the factories (and then coal supplies as technology progressed), a willing work force and creative entrepreneurs with the vision and drive to construct the new regime. ~ Historic UK.

Raw cotton was imported from the US colonies to Lancashire mills where it would be spun and woven. A bale would cost 40 times less to purchase by the mill than the price they would sell the finished fabric as. The Indian economy was non-existent due to the Brits and so they had no choice but to purchase the cotton fabric - known as ‘dhootie’ - if they could even afford it.

With the onset of the American Civil War in 1861, raw cotton fibre as import ran dry putting strain on the newly organised social classes. The depression hit the working class factory folk and come October 1861 there were mill closures, mass unemployment, and poverty hit. Parmar’s Khadi film showed the Cotton Famine Road in Rochdale, a hammer and chisel-hewn stone road made by unemployed cotton mill workers who had gone on to support the abolition of slavery in the US.

However, it was Gandhi leading a campaign for independence for India against the British in the early 20th century, which included a boycott against any imported British goods, that brought the downfall of the British cotton industry. The British government invited Gandhi over to witness the hardships felt by East Lancashire textile mill workers (!), yet ancestors of those who had initially sided with slavery abolition were now siding with Gandhi for his persistence and bravery in independence.

Parmar’s film highlights stories from the mill workers (and ancestors of) - in particular the father of the commissioned filmmaker Sima Gonsai - along with shots of the khadi paper being punched. It evokes the intensive yet thoughtful labour involved in such a material, and the many layers of its production. The film isn’t available to watch, but you can access a five-minute video from Super Slow Way of Parmar’s process.

Language.

Britain’s colonial rule over the subcontinent (what we now call South Asia) including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, parts of Uzbekistan and Nepal, extracted material knowledge and wealth, along with physical materials and migrants. It is this aspect of cotton that rang most uncertain to me. Despite being British, and being taught in a British school about British history, I don’t remember anything covered about the Empire, other than maybe the Roman one.

Another part of the Crafts Council exhibit featured Raisa Kabir, an interdisciplinary artist, educator and weaver who was brought up in Manchester and now based in London. Her textile practice “explores open colonial legacies and the heritage of Bangladeshi weaving, shining a light on labour, migration and the fragmentation of place”. In Kabir’s accompanying film Resistances, 2019, she shines a light on the borders set in place as Indian independence took hold, and the splitting of identities and cultures.

In collaboration with John Spencer Textiles and Queen Street Mill Textile Museum in Lancashire, Kabir undertook a research project to explore John Forbes Watson’s Collections of the Textile Manufactures of India, textile sample books that showcased the very best of Indian textiles. Although the title only mentions India, the books include fabrics from many countries, from Iran in the West to Burma in the East. The majority of the textiles were produced in what is now India and Pakistan. Mostly highlighting cotton fabrics, but with blends of silk and wool, the books contained 700 samples of cloth typically used for garments such as turbans, saris, dhotis and lungis. 18 volumes were produced, 13 of which are in the UK, but most were split over their lifetime as the samples were in fact used for textile recreation - as John Forbes Watson probably intended.

You can actually see pages from the volumes on The Textile Manufactures of India website, where you can search by origin, material, pattern and technique.

The film shows Kabir handling two of the books for the first time, and as samples are uncovered, she describes the situation behind them, for instance how nationalism is attached to different fabrics e.g. the different borders (selvedges) of a Bangladesh muslin versus a Calcutta muslin. Or how Bengal fabric would be blended with an indigenous muga silk for ornamental value. Or even the copying of the traditional pine pattern into the commonly-named paisley pattern, produced on jacquard looms in the Scottish town of Paisley.

Images: 1. Photo of one of the volumes of the ‘Textile Manufactures of India’ at the exhibition; 2. Photo of Raisa Kabir’s film ‘Resistances’ as she flicks through the aforementioned volume; 3. Image of a volume’s page from the ‘Textile Manufactures of India’ website; 4. Screenshot of the ‘Textile Manufactures of India’ website showing a selection of samples from Rajasthan.

Also on show was a hand-woven panel The art and language of weaving resistance, 2021, that explores the connection of migrancy to and belonging in East Lancashire using a self-designed encrypted code. Letters of the Bangla alphabet are converted into weaving code and woven into a vibrant panel referencing the diasporas of Burnley (Kashmir, Punjab, Sylhet and Bangladesh); this place chosen because of Kabir’s Art in Manufacturing residency at John Spencer Textiles based in Burnley (curated by The National Festival of Making and co-commissioned by British Textile Biennial). See a five-minute film of Kabir explaining this residency.

Images: 1-2. Full and close-up photo of Raisa Kabir’s hand-woven panel ‘The art and language of weaving resistance’, 2021; 3. Raisa Kabir’s loom and weave of a piece made in collaboration with the public at the Festival of Making, 2022; 4. Example of Raisa Kabir’s alphabet code used to program the loom for ‘The art and language of weaving resistance’ piece.

Exploitation.

The word exploitation would probably evoke in you images of slavery on cotton plantations in the United States, rather than what was actually highlighted within this exhibition. The fast fashion industry is exploitative in terms of materials, resources and people (labour), and that’s what was highlighted in Brigid McLeer’s installation and film Collateral.

London-based Irish artist and educator, McLeer explores how our lives intersect with historic events, and the capacity of images to ‘act’ within politicised art practices. Her site-based installation Collateral was originally commissioned for Queen Street Mill Textile Museum in Lancashire, and is a film and embroidered panel. Both pieces in unison - though the panel was significant enough for me in itself - memorialise the deaths of garment factory workers, highlighting the cost of human life and the true meaning of value in the globalised fashion system.

Today, cotton remains one the most profitable crops in the world - for the market and for the seed and chemical input retailers (i.e. Monsanto), but not for the farmers or producers. It is the second most important fibre in terms of volume; with about 24.7 million tonnes, it had a market share of approximately 22% of global fibre production in 2021 [Textile Exchange Perferred Fiber & Materials Report 2022]. Note, recycled cotton is only 1% of this 22%.

“Bangladesh is the second largest exporter of garments globally and the fashion industry has an estimated value of £1.4 trillion. The legacy of Britain’s relationship to cotton lives on in South Asia’s textile industry today, defined by low wages, precarious working conditions and detrimental environmental consequences” {words from the Crafts Council exhibition guide}.

McLeer’s film and tangible work consider the devastation put upon garment workers in South Asia. The film features excerpts from an interview with a Thai factory fire survivor interwoven with music and clog dancing performed by a folk duo (seemingly within the Queen Street Textile Mill Museum) - watch an excerpt here. This sounds zany, but clogs were worn by mill workers due to the durability, and incidentally, clog making is a critically endagered craft as classified by the advocacy body Heritage Crafts (we no longer have mills, really, but we do have synthetic footwear). I wasn’t particularly drawn to this piece, rather the embroidered panel in front was much more hard-hitting.

The cotton panel was produced with the aid of 120 people across the UK along with Lancashire-based embroiderers, inspired by a lacework panel commemorating the Battle of Britain held in the textile collection of Gawthorpe Hall in Burnley - another example of cotton having once been a precious commodity. From afar it appears as a lovely white tablecloth, though up close you see the stitchings of a number of motifs, place names and numbers.

• Hashem, Bangladesh - 2021. 52.

• Kader, Thailand - 1993. 188.

• Kentex, Philippines - 2015. 74.

• Triangle, USA - 1911. 146.

• Booths, Huddersfield - 1941. 49.

• Rana Plaza, Bangladesh - 2013. 1132.

• Colne, Colne Bridge - 1818. 17.

• Zhili, China - 1993. 87.

• Ali Enterprises, Pakistan - 2012. 289.

• Tazreen, Bangladesh - 2012. 117.

• Gaofu, China - 1993. 61.

• Hameem, Bangladesh - 2010. 31.

• James Watt Street, Glasgow - 1968. 22.

Each of these was a factory tragedy - a fire or collapse - that occured because of, ultimately, lack of regulation. The numbers indicate the amount dead. Rana Plaza was placed dead centre of the embroidered panel looking on to the video screen.

Images: 1-2. Full and close-up photo of ‘Collateral’ in situ at the Crafts Council Gallery; 3-4. Images from Brigid McLeer’s website showing the site-based installation at Queen Street Textile Mill Museum.

Colonialism.

So while slavery wasn’t mentioned, colonialism is, though at the base level it seems that the everyday citizen would associate slavery with cotton, rather than the broader framework in which slavery was deemed acceptable. Colonialism is almost manipulative, a seedy undertone that is less spoken of - at least what I get from being a white British female. As spoken about above, it was the extraction of people from place, of materials from people, and the disregard of any knowledge or culture or wisdom, that relays cotton as simply a commodity rather than a lifeblood.

Unfortunately I couldn’t pay much attention to the final artist - Reetu Sattar - as the brightness of the projection in a dark room really stung my eyes. Bangladesh-based multi-disciplinary artist Sattar explores the tension between performance art and theatre and the movement of bodies inside spaces, and is particularly interested in the impact of colonialism on muslin, “a rare cotton fabric that has longstanding historical and indigenous links to undivided Bengal”. Shabnam is a film that explores the historic and continuing relationship between East Lancashire and Bangladesh in the continuous cycle for the supply and demand of textiles - watch a trailer for it here.

Mentioned in Raisa Kabir’s film, the skills for weaving such a fine muslin is almost lost, though there is a revival as organisations push for this. With a change in cotton varieties (they’re all mostly genetically modified now, with indigenous varieties rare) it is challenging to spin and weave such a fine thread. Muslin these days is the cheap stuff that people use to make toiles or simple curtains, but in fact historically was a luxury textile. The origin of the finest muslin came from the banks of the Meghna River, and was produced in Dhaka in the 17th and 18th centuries, being exported to fancy Brits for their fashions. With a desire for cheap materials, British cloth manufacturers conspired to break Bengali weaver’s looms, and with an influx of the locally-made fabrics (still from imported cotton crop) the skills of muslin weaving essentially died out.

Quite a mini exhibition with just the four artists, but the films were long making it a lot to get through, with topics that I hadn’t anticipated it covering. Crafts Council also have a library of textile books so you could make it a whole study visit and hang out.

A reminder that it is on show until 4th March 2023, London.

Additional resources:

Cotton: Labour, Land and Body exhibition page [Crafts Council Gallery]

Breaking down borders: Movement and migration through cloth / Panel 1:51 [Conversations in Creativity via Creative Lancashire for the British Textile Biennial]. This panel explores the narratives and intersections that connect migrant journeys through the global textile industry and perspectives on cultural appropriation within crafts practices. With Alice Kettle, Bharti Parmar, Raisa Kabir, Serkan Delice and host Amber Butchart.

The Seeds of Vandana Shiva (film) / Terra Viva by Vandana Shiva, 2022 (book). Highlights a lifelong campaign against Monsanto and Bt cotton. The film is available for individual downloads in 2023.

Empire of Cotton by Sven Beckert, 2014 (book). The epic story of the rise and fall of the empire of cotton, its centrality to the world economy, and its making and remaking of global capitalism.

Cotton: The Fabric That Made the Modern World by Giorgio Riello, 2013 (book). This is a fascinating and insightful story which ranges from Asian and European technologies and African slavery to cotton plantations in the Americas and consumer desires across the globe, and is particularly strong when it comes to Indian textiles.

The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History by Kassia St. Clair, 2018 (book). Design journalist Kassia St. Clair guides us through the technological advancements and cultural customs that would redefine human civilization. There’s a whole section on cotton called Solomon’s Coats about American trade.

The Heritage of Cotton: the Fibre of Two Worlds and Many Ages by Morris de Camp Crawford, 1948 (book). Republished in 2021 in the US as it is believed by scholars that this work is culturally important, but hard to get hold of.

The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World by Virginia Postrel, 2020 (book). “Synthesizing groundbreaking research from economics, archaeology, and anthropology, Postrel weaves a rich tapestry of human cultural development.” Not yet read, it seems to uncover the ways that man’s greed spurred on advancements in technology to create ever more accessible fabrics.

Fibershed: Growing a Movement of Farmers, Fashion Activists, and Makers for a New Textile Economy by Rebecca Burgess, 2019 (book). Looking at farm-to-closet production, this book does draw on natural colour cotton native to the United States and Central America, and the importance generally on preserving fibre varieties.

Cotton: The Biography of a Revolutionary Fiber by Stephen Yafa, 2004 (book). Haven’t personally read it; reviews state that it gives a general overview but misses the human element of the story of cotton.

Fabric: The Hidden History of the Material World by Victoria Finlay, 2021 (book). “For Fabric I travelled to many places, including Papua New Guinea to learn how to make cloth out of trees; Guatemala to try and spin cotton; China to see the Neolithic pot which held the earliest known example of coloured silk; Gee’s Bend Alabama to learn about patchwork; northern India to find out what was so extraordinary about the pashmina shawls woven in Kashmir; and Paisley to discover why exactly that Scottish town became associated with the patterns on those Kashmir shawls.”

Worn: A People's History of Clothing by Sofi Thanhauser, 2022 (book). ”In this ambitious, panoramic social history, Sofi Thanhauser brilliantly tells five stories--Linen, Cotton, Silk, Synthetics, Wool--about the clothes we wear and where they come from, illuminating our world in unexpected ways.”