Emily Tonge

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. Through archival research into the 1930s Cotton Queen phenomenon, the work traces the material slippage between the female body and the industrial machine, and the constructed identities built to serve this.

Elements of heavy textile machinery, once operated by these women, are alienated, abstracted, and clothed—made ready to perform. These lineal forms confront the harnessing of female bodies as tools of empire, and the continued reincarnations of this coloniality. Constructed from curved mild steel and hand-printed devoré textile, the Scutcher sits at the centre of the work. Drawing on the industrial machine used to break down raw cotton into sheets, it becomes an apparatus through which women’s labour is organised and controlled, exposing the dynamics of power embedded within linear systems of extraction and domination.