Textile Biennial
16 - 19 October 2025
Lancaster, Lancashire

The British Textile Biennial is a month-long 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.

In 2025, the festival expands its reach to the city of Lancaster with Margo Selby’s textile artwork, Breathing Colour, immersive in colour, form and sound, on exhibition in the imposing Ashton Memorial building.  Made during an Art in Manufacturing residency at Standfast & Barracks, this site-responsive textile sculpture evokes the movement of cloth throughout the factory. The audible piece by Peter Coyte that accompanies the textile, incorporates the sounds and the voices of the factory. The 160 colours within the work were all contributed with personal colour stories by the 160 employees working within the factory. This project marked the beginning of Margo Selby’s ‘Living Colour Chart.’

Led by a panel of experts, this talk will take place in the Ashton Memorial, the site of the ‘Breathing Colour’ installation. Margo will expand on her personal approach to colour, the experience of the residency at Standfast and Barracks, and the inspiration, conceptual development and making processes behind the Breathing Colour installation.

Panel Discussion:

The Future of a Colour panel discussion in collaboration with @creativelancs takes place on 17th October, and will see Margo Selby in conversation with a panel of academic experts and industry experts who will be talking about their independent research and approach to thinking about the use of colour within the textile industry.

17 October 2025
10am - 12:30pm
Ashton Memorial, Lancaster

This is a free but limited capacity ticketed event.

The British Textile Biennial offers an extraordinary and incredibly accessible opportunity to witness textile artistry in many forms, from innovative contemporary installations to traditional craft demonstrations by master artisans and community-based projects.

It's a privilege to be part of this international line-up of artists which have been brought to Lancashire for this diverse programme of exhibitions. It's such an inspiring curation of thought provoking textile art embracing a wide range of perspectives and ideas. I'm looking forward to seeing how the ‘Breathing Colour’ piece will hang in the striking Ashton Memorial building and how it will converse with this new space. It's particularly poignant that it should hang in Lancaster, the town where it was made and the town where many of the 160 employees of Standfast and Barracks live, the contributors of the 160 colours which were used within the piece.

– Margo Selby

Breathing Colour, is a co-commission by the National Festival of Making and British Textile Biennial.