The Cotton Queen Quest: It Fitted Like a Glove (2023)

The Cotton Queen Quest investigates imperial and gendered practices of control, power and pageantry in the North of England. The TCQQ phenomenon exemplifies the material slippage between the female body and the industrial machine, and constructed identities built to serve this.

Elements of heavy textile machinery women worked with are alienated, abstracted and clothed ready to perform. Creating this lineal form threatens the harnessing of female bodies as tools of empire and the continued reincarnations of this coloniality. 

A Scutcher is an industrial machine that breaks down raw cotton into sheets, and in these works acts as an apparatus around which women’s labour is imposed. Simultaneously, demonstrating the dynamics of power imposed upon labouring women, in linear systems of extraction and domination. 

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