Weaving The Future at Salts Mill

Weaving the Future is an exhibition of film, photography and artefacts that explores how Britain’s textile industry is being reinvented for the 21st century. Wool and cotton fuelled the world’s first industrial revolution. Now a vast array of fibres are driving a new revolution, with textiles being used to create a vast range of innovative products, from heart valves and new knee cartilage to high tech vehicles. Weaving the Future also demonstrates the link between our analogue and digital worlds, showing how the binary systems that once drove textile looms led to the development of computer programming. The exhibition was commissioned by the 2019 Saltaire Festival as the flagship arts event of the annual festival, now in its 17th year. Combining photography and film by Tim Smith and Chris Squire with performance by Balbir Singh Dance Company and Dance United Yorkshire it opens on 13th September at Salts Mill, itself an iconic textiles mill reinvented as home to a range of cutting edge digital industries. Weaving the Future shows how the innovative spirit that once powered the textile industry is alive and well by highlighting the skills of people who work with wool, cotton and other fibres, adapting traditional methods and machinery to make top quality, distinctive goods for specialist markets worldwide. Textiles also provide a unique knowledge base for cutting edge research, as traditional technologies are used in new and surprising ways to develop pioneering materials for diverse industries, from aerospace to biomedical textiles.