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For nearly 160 years, the blue plaque has marked sites of historic importance. Now one English institution has found its own way of signifying a flagship moment while interrogating its past – a blue dress.
The new artwork, at Manchester Art Gallery, commemorates the occasion when the African American abolitionist Sarah Parker Remond made a speech on the site in 1859.
Inspired by the silhouette of an outfit Parker Remond wore, the dress links stories from the African, American and European continents in its detailing, exploring Manchester’s links to slavery through visual metaphor.
The common thread is cotton – the commodity linking Victorian Manchester’s emergence as an industrial powerhouse with the transatlantic trade in people, a connection that came under greater examination in the city after 2020’s Black Lives Matter protests.
Unveiled this week, the Victorian-style gown – complete with petticoat, corset, pantaloons, chemise and crinoline – is the work of the artist Holly Graham, who said she wanted to bring Parker Remond’s “voice back into the space” where it was heard more than 165 years ago.
Graham collaborated with her mother, the stage and screen costumier Jennifer Graham, and was assisted by researchers to create the dress for the exhibition The Warp/ The Weft/ The Wake.
The dress’s print references the marbled endpapers of the subscriber logbooks of the Royal Manchester Institution (RMI), 1823’s forerunner organisation to Manchester Art Gallery, whose benefactors included members of the Greg family, of Cheshire’s Quarry Bank Mill, who enslaved people in Dominica.
“I was thinking about how abolitionist histories are championed in British cultural memory, but without always confronting why those principles were needed in the first place,” Graham said.
The artwork also takes inspiration from rare, archive samples of “Guinea cloth”, also known as Manchester check, a fabric produced for west African markets in the “triangular trade” in people and goods.
“I was interested in the resemblance of the check print to the grid that bound the names of the RMI subscribers in the institution’s ledgers, to highlight the names of those whose money was assigned to the founding of the institution, but also the names that are not included … those whose labour facilitates the wealth that was invested in the institution,” Graham said.
Parker Remond travelled to England in the late 1850s to urge mill owners and workers to support abolition in the United States, and then to support the Union blockade against plantation owners of the American south.
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A physician who campaigned for women’s suffrage on both sides of the Atlantic, Parker Remond told a friend of her UK reception: “I have been received here as a sister by white women for the first time in my life … I have received a sympathy I never was offered before.”
In Manchester, Parker Remond highlighted the connection between Manchester and enslaved Americans, before adding: “Your [Thomas] Clarkson and your [William] Wilberforce [abolitionists] are names of strength to us. I ask you, raise the moral public opinion until its voice reaches the American shores … until the shackles of the American slave melt like dew before the morning sun. I ask especial help from the women of England. Women are the worst victims of the slave power.”
While Manchester boomed during a cotton trade from which “not one cent”, as Parker Remond reminded her audience, reached enslaved labourers, the city was also a centre of abolitionist sentiment. The anti-slavery campaigner Richard Cobden was a founder of the Manchester Athenaeum, where the African American statesman and writer Frederick Douglass also lectured.
Inbal Livine, a senior creative lead at Manchester City Galleries, said: “Manchester Art Gallery is a central part of the city’s complex history. Holly Graham’s work provides an exciting opportunity to link empire, colonialism and exploitation of the past with real and immediate concerns of the present around representation, racism and power.”
Both Parker Remond and Douglass were featured as part of the Guardian’s Cotton Capital series. The series launched with the Scott Trust Legacies of Enslavement programme, a 10-year restorative justice initiative launched in March 2023 in response to the Guardian founders’ connections to transatlantic enslavement.
