Holly Graham: The Warp/The Weft/The Wake
14 MARCH 2025 - 6 SEPTEMBER 2026
Manchester Art Gallery
Free
Holly Graham’s residency explores memory, narrative and cotton’s colonial legacies, creating work inspired by Sarah Parker Remond and Manchester’s textile archives.
THE WARP/ THE WEFT/ THE WAKE is the outcome of a residency project with London based artist Holly Graham. The work was created as part of 20/20 a national commissioning and network programme led by the University of the Arts London (UAL) in partnership with the Decolonising Arts Institute. 20/20 paired/connected emerging artists of colour with UK public art collections, leading to 20 new works represented in the collections.
Throughout her residency, Graham researched 18th and 19th Century pattern books, patchwork samples and cotton dresses held in the textile collections at Platt Hall alongside the archives of the Royal Manchester Institution (RMI), the forerunner to Manchester City Galleries. She explored the legacies and impact of the cotton industry and the industrial expansion that fuelled the growth of the city and the wealth of the collectors, merchants and industrialists who founded The RMI in 1823. Thinking through the contemporary connections to cotton Graham worked with communities in and around Platt Hall developing project Textiles and Tall Tales. Working with 422 Longsight Art Space she interviewed and recorded people discussing their memories and relationship with cotton in all its forms.
From her research, Graham has created a body of new work that centred around a Victorian style printed cotton performance costume modelled on the silhouette of a dress worn by African American abolitionist Sarah Parker Remond. Remond visited Manchester during a tour of Britain in 1859 and delivered an anti-slavery speech in the Athenaeum, a building which was incorporated into what is now Manchester Art Gallery. The printed cloth of the performance costume references the marbled end papers and ledgers of RMI subscribers’ logbooks and samples from the pages of Platt Hall’s pattern book collection. These include rare surviving examples of woven Manchester check, also known as ‘Guinea cloth’– cheaply produced cloth, often worn by enslaved people on plantations and manufactured for sale to West African markets in exchange for goods, including enslaved people.
I was interested in the resemblance of the check print to the grid that bound the names of the RMI subscribers in the institution’s ledgers, to highlight the names of those whose money was assigned to the founding of the institution, but also to signpost towards the names that are not included; and to think about whose labour facilitates the wealth that was then invested into the institution.’
Holly Graham
