British Textile Biennial (BTB21) - last chance to see exhibitions at Blackburn Museum & Art Gallery
14 December 2021 by Ed
Last Chance to see a great range of BTB21 exhibitions and installations at Blackburn Museum & Art Gallery telling the story of textiles, across continents and centuries, in the service of fast fashion, expression and identity.
There is now only days remaining to see three stunning and ground-breaking British Textile Biennial 2021 exhibitions at Blackburn Museum & Art Gallery featuring Azraa Motala, Bharti Parmar and Homegrown Homespun.
All three tell the story of textiles, across continents and centuries, in the service of fast fashion, expression and identity.
The British Textile Biennial throws a spotlight on the nation’s creativity, innovation and expression in textiles against the backdrop of the impressive infrastructure of the cotton industry in Pennine Lancashire. Read more
Azraa Motala - Unapologetic
Azraa Motala creates work that seeks to untangle culturally inherited expectations and the overlapping aspects of her own identity as a young British-Asian Muslim woman, exploring the way in which women from the diaspora have been represented in both the past and the present day, particularly through their dress. Through large scale oil paintings, she re-appropriates the European image of the Eastern woman as it was depicted in so-called Orientalist paintings from the 18th and 19th centuries; essentially adopting the same medium to portray opposing imagery and challenging the accepted notion of dress.
Unapologetic challenges the ongoing narrative of “otherness” and provides a platform for an overlooked community of young British South Asian women from the North West, too often invisible and unheard. Read more
Bharti Parmar - Khadi
In the year marking the 90th anniversary of Gandhi’s historic visit to Darwen, Khadi is an ambitious new installation by Bharti Parmar comprising archival images of the Mahatma’s visit, artefacts from Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery and delicate drawings and sculptures made from Khadi paper. Khadi refers to homespun cloth promoted by Gandhi as a protest about English rule in India.
It also refers to a thick cotton watercolour paper made by hand in India. The artist has sourced Khadi paper from India made from recycled cotton t-shirts to reveal themes of global connections, fast fashion, labour and colonialism. The work stems from Parmar’s life-long interest in textile history and her personal narrative as the daughter of an Indian immigrant textile mill worker in Yorkshire and includes a film collaboration with award-winning, Blackburn-born film maker, Sima Gonsai. Read more
Homegrown/Homespun
Homegrown/Homespun is a ground-breaking regenerative fashion project in collaboration with designer Patrick Grant, his social enterprise Community Clothing & NW England Fibreshed. Over Spring and Summer 2021 we turned unused land in the town into a field of flax and woad. The flax has now been harvested and retted to create the first Homegrown/Homespun fabric in collaboration with North West England Fibreshed and Community Clothing. Read more
All three BTB21 Expiations end on Saturday 18 December 2021
Venue: Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery, Blackburn, BB1 7AJ
Times: Wednesday-Saturday 12-4:45PM
Admission: Free
britishtextilebiennial.co.uk
