The British Textile Biennial returns to Queen Street Mill in 2025. British Textile Biennial is a free festival of contemporary art, commissioning artists and designers from all over the world to make work inspired by the context and legacy of the textile industry in East Lancashire and its global impact, often in the places that were created by it.
This year’s exhibitions explore invention and innovation in textile production; through indigenous knowledge to space-age technology, from the earliest form of shelter, the tent, to space suits, and from plant-based dyes to the first polymers.
At Queen Street Mill you’ll be able to see Sarah Rosalena’s “Standard Candle and Expanding Axis”. Rosalena works between traditional craft traditions and emerging technology, breaking boundaries through her hybrid forms rooted in Indigenous cosmologies, re-interpreted through digital tools and her hand. These works were made during a residency at Mount Wilson Observatory in California drawing parallels between the use of so-called ‘low skill’ labour – women in weaving as Jacquard pattern readers and women in physics as “computers”. Here, visitors can explore Rosalena’s work, and also see a 19th-century Jacquard loom, witness demonstrations of historic textile machinery, and experience the original Lancashire Looms in action—still in-situ since the mill’s opening in 1895, offering a rare and immersive glimpse into Britain’s textile heritage.
After experiencing the artwork, visitors are warmly encouraged to explore the rest of the mill and discover its remarkable heritage first-hand.
