PREPARATIONS are under way for a major textile exhibition centred in Blackburn in October.

The show will be presented against the backdrop of the impressive infrastructure of the cotton industry in Pennine Lancashire.

The month-long British Textile Biennial 2021 is a return of a successful event in 2019.

Featuring a major commission by Turner Prize winning artist Lubaina Himid with fashion historian and TV presenter Amber Butchart as guest curator, it will present events in former mills and other spaces around East Lancashire, such as Blackburn’s Cotton Exchange and Burnley’s Queen Street Mill.

This October’s biennial, organised by Super Slow Way, focuses on the global nature of textiles.

It includes a groundbreaking, sustainable fashion project by designer and Great British Sewing Bee judge Patrick Grant and a collaboration with artist James Fox and actor Maxine Peake.

There also will be ‘C.P. Company Cinquanta’, a retrospective of the Italian sportswear company’s 50th anniversary organised by Darwen-born brand consultant Gary Aspden, who brought his vast collection of adidas trainers to the biennial in 2019.

It takes place in Darwen from October 1 to 10.

Blackburn with Darwen’s growth boss Cllr Phil Riley said: “This is a fantastic project.

“Gary Aspden’s ability to bring major companies to the borough is simply exceptional.

“As the world starts to recover from the pandemic, we all need reasons to feel optimistic about the future, and it’s good to see the British Textile Biennial growing and bringing new cultural ideas and audiences to the borough and the wider region.”

Azraa Motala has created a series of painted portraits of the overlooked young British South Asian women from Lancashire to be displayed in the Harris Museum collection in Preston and reproduced on banners hung on civic buildings in Blackburn, Pendle, Accrington and Burnley.

In the Blackburn Cotton Exchange, Jasleen Kaur, Jamie Holman and Masimba Hwati will explore the residual cultural identities of the British Empire.

To mark the 90th anniversary of Gandhi’s historic visit to Darwen, ‘Re-Thinking Khadi’ is a new work by Bharti Parmar that takes the textile archive of Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery as its focus and includes a film collaboration with Blackburn-born film Sima Gonsai.

The ‘Homegrown/Homespun’ collaboration with Mr Grant will reveal the first pair of commercial homegrown and homespun jeans after a field of flax and woad was planted on the banks of the Leeds and Liverpool Canal in Blackburn.

James Fox’s new work at Helmshore Mill explores the history of protest and punishment via the Lancashire loombreaker riots of 1826.

Queen Street Mill, Burnley, will host exhibitions by Reetu Sattar, Brigid McCleer and Raisa Kabir.

There will also be an exhibition of items from the Gawthorpe Textile Collection