Creative Collaboration & Participation
As part of Global Thread’s Summer 2022 programme of public engagement at the Science and Industry Museum, we were joined by Manchester-based electro-knitter and arts facilitator Green Jay Crafts to help us get hands-on with making and designing our own textiles.
Given the focus of Global Threads on Manchester’s historic cotton connections, we of course made sure that cotton was at the centre of the fun and innovative way our visitors interacted with, and discovered more about, our work!
Jay also designed and facilitated the creation of our Global Threads banner, which was created collectively by visitors across seven hours, each completing a few lines of knitting to assemble a unique artistic response to the research of our team which is now part of the Science and Industry Museum’s permanent collections.
Making Together
Across three days, hundreds of visitors were able to knit themselves into Manchester’s textiles history by creating their own cotton swatches. With Jay’s design expertise (and unending patience!) and the magic of electro-knitting, visitors could choose to design their own pattern or select a design based on themes drawn from our Global Threads case studies.
Using two vintage knitting machines, our visitors were able to get hands-on experience of knitting line-by-line of thread, programmed using handmade punchcard patterns – channelling the legacies of labour and skills in the space as this was all done within metres of the Museum’s extensive collection of historic weaving machinery.
Here is a selection of images from across three busy days of electro-knitting activity:
Crafting Responses to our Global Threads
The opportunity for our visitors to get involved in and learn more about crafting and textile manufacture through engaging with the historic connections between Manchester and global experiences of colonisation and enslavement was made possible by the phenomenal creative interpretation and design skills of Green Jay Crafts.
In this section, Jay explains how the work of our Global Threads researchers inspired four original electro-knitted designs.
The Kumbaya design was inspired by the case study From Ancoats to the Sea Islands ↗ which looks at how Manchester’s cotton was grown in South Carolina and Georgia, and explores the lives of these enslaved people.
The Gullah-Geechee people retained strong links to their West African heritage, and a rich culture. The case study mentions Gullah music and worship, as well as traditional sweetgrass weaving, so I chose to represent these in the Kumbaya knitting with little sweetgrasses at the side. The song Kumbaya is creole for “come by here”, and is a call for the Lord to come to those in need.
The Not One Cent design comes from a quote from Sarah Parker Remond, an African American abolitionist who travelled across the Atlantic to Manchester in 1859, where she spoke independently to call the people of Manchester into action against enslavement. She drew the audience’s attention to the wealth and development visible in Manchester that had come from the cotton industry, and reminded them that “not one cent of the money ever reached the hands of the labourers”.
The design with the two people holding hands is based on a panel from a quilt made between 1895 and 1898 by Harriet Powers, an African American folk artist born into slavery. The quilt used traditional patchwork techniques to depict local and astronomical events as well as biblical scenes.
The top right panel depicts John baptising Christ and the spirit of God descending and resting upon his shoulder like a dove.
Lastly is a sign for Little Ireland, a slum which existed for a very short period of time in the mid 1800s. It was home to an impoverished mostly Irish community who had migrated to England in search of a better life, which they did not find. You can still see the imprints of this community in Manchester if you look just south of Oxford road station.
The people who lived here have their living and working conditions, as well as the discrimination they faced, and their union activism documented in the case study The Irish in Nineteenth-Century Manchester ↗
A New Legacy of Cottonopolis in the Collection
The final, and most impressive, piece of participatory craft work produced as part of our Summer 2022 engagement programme is this banner which painstakingly designed and programmed from an original portrait by Green Jay Crafts.
Inspired by the narratives uncovered and shared together by the Global Threads researchers, Jay’s creation poses a provocative question to visitors and viewers, as well as to the museum and wider collection it is now a part of: “Who Grew the Cotton?”
Not only is the banner an excellent example of artistic and design expertise and vision which earns it a proud place within the permanent museum collection, the practice that underpinned its creation is equally an importance source of its significance.
Using an electro-knitting machine during our final engagement day, over seven hours a host of visitors, not to mention Global Threads team members, participated in its creation by each knitting a few of the hundreds of lines of cotton together.
It was great to welcome Jay to the Global Threads team to work together to turn our research into a host of enjoyable, engaging, and impactful activities for our hundreds of visitors. The collaborative creation of the banner and its challenging sentiment are a fitting legacy rendered in cotton for the first year of our project and point towards a future of collective design, making, and provocation to discover and explore more of our global connections.
We thought we would finish this article with some wonderful examples of the design and making work of some of our hundreds of visitors and participants, including the smiles of some of our happy customers!
GLOBAL THREADS 
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