INTERWOVEN wants your textile industry memories and stories!

If you or anyone you know works or worked in the textile industry in and around Dewsbury we’d love to hear from you so that we can include your memories and stories in the INTERWOVEN project.

To find out more please see the website and fill in the form. We will arrange a time to have a chat with you. There’s absolutely no obligation to be involved and we won’t use any material without your permission.

INTERWOVEN began at the first WOVEN festival in June 2019 – a boliyan and choir performance that told stories of textile industry immigration from the industrial revolution to the present day. It was further developed for the 2021 festival as a unique soundscape of the Kirklees area, both its mill heritage and its present – a mixture of machinery, work, storytelling, brass music and boliyan.

Artists Hardeep Sahota, Mandeep Samra and Boff Whalley created a weave of ideas, something at once both unusual and recognisable, drawing from the collected stories and images of the people who’ve spent lifetimes working in the Kirklees mills. Featuring the Huddersfield Boliyan Ensemble with Swanjit Kaur, Skelmanthorpe Brass Band and folk singer Johnny Campbell. The visual and sound installation was displayed in a shop window in Huddersfield for WOVEN 2021 and you can watch it online.

We now plan to bring INTERWOVEN to Dewsbury for an exhibition and live performance in March 2022. The new musical piece will use the existing soundscape as a starting point and then build in additional artistic content and textile industry stories from Dewsbury.

Thanks for your help!

For more information visit https://woveninkirklees.co.uk/interwoven-wants-your-textile-industry-memories-and-stories/