What unfolds when imaginative artists enter the dynamic world of working factories, guided by the hum of machines, the scent of dye, and the patience of human craft? The answer lies in Blackburn, Lancashire, where the National Festival of Making returns in July 2025 for its ninth edition. This vibrant celebration is unlike any other in the UK, blending contemporary art with real-world production processes to explore new frontiers in creativity, community, and craftsmanship.
Each year, Blackburn’s town centre is transformed into an urban gallery and hands-on creative hub, offering an unforgettable experience for thousands of visitors. The festival merges the modern and the traditional, the industrial and the personal, through events that captivate both the casual browser and the seasoned creative professional.
A Nationally Recognised Platform for Art and Industry
The National Festival of Making continues to define itself as a unique and evolving celebration of creativity, craftsmanship, and industry. Its core initiative, Art in Manufacturing, is unlike any other residency programme in the UK. Rooted in Lancashire’s industrial heritage and designed to foster collaborative experimentation, this initiative places contemporary artists within the very heart of working factories. In doing so, it creates an environment where art and industry engage in reciprocal dialogue, pushing boundaries and generating new cultural meaning.
Since its launch in 2016, Art in Manufacturing has developed into a nationally significant model of artistic engagement. The programme has nurtured more than 30 artists in collaboration with over 20 manufacturing firms across Lancashire and beyond. These residencies don’t merely inspire one-off pieces—they result in long-term conversations, skill exchange, and artistic output deeply connected to material, process, and place.
Each artist embedded in the programme gains rare access to tools, expertise, and environments typically off-limits to the public or to the broader art world. From textile looms to ceramic kilns, and from paint laboratories to engineering workshops, these industrial contexts become creative laboratories where traditional techniques meet radical innovation.
The 2025 edition of the festival brings a fresh wave of ambitious commissions. At its centre are three standout artist-manufacturer collaborations that speak to the very ethos of the programme: to foster powerful, place-based, and imaginative creative works born through industrial immersion. These residencies are not only visually compelling—they are socially engaged, technically refined, and rooted in the working lives and environments of the people behind the scenes.
Lewis Jones: Clay, Craft, and Architectural Futures
In a major new commission, artist Lewis Jones embarks on a deep investigation into the future potential of architectural ceramics. Best known as a founding member of the Turner Prize-winning collective Assemble, Jones has stepped into a new phase of his career with the launch of Matter at Hand, a practice dedicated to interrogating materials and sustainable design.
For his residency, Jones is working alongside Darwen Terracotta, one of the UK’s most prestigious producers of hand-crafted architectural ceramics. Based in Lancashire, this firm is renowned for its precise, heritage-informed tile work and its long-standing contributions to buildings of historical and cultural significance across the country. But in this collaboration, the focus is not on preservation—it’s on progression.
Spending more than a year immersed in the day-to-day workings of the factory, Jones has undertaken extensive hands-on research with the clay itself. From crafting and mould-making to glazing and high-temperature firing, the artist has studied every facet of the ceramic-making process. The residency has opened up new conceptual and formal possibilities for how ceramic elements might operate in public spaces—not just as surface materials or decorative flourishes, but as foundational components of future architecture.
His final installation, set to be unveiled inside Blackburn Cathedral during the festival, blends experimental sculpture with environmental sensibility. The piece engages with the cathedral’s spiritual and architectural vocabulary while drawing attention to clay’s deep ecological relevance. This is clay not as nostalgic reference but as a contemporary medium capable of expressing complexity, fluidity, and renewal. In form and concept, Jones’s work questions the permanence of built environments and challenges the hierarchies that separate fine art from functional design.
Morag Myerscough: Painting a Town with Joy and Colour
Morag Myerscough brings an entirely different kind of energy to the 2025 edition of Art in Manufacturing. Celebrated internationally for her joyful and immersive public artworks, Myerscough has long made it her mission to bring art out of institutions and into the fabric of everyday life. Her aesthetic, full of colour, geometric shapes, and uplifting messages, transforms ordinary urban spaces into celebratory canvases.
In this year’s residency, she partners with Crown Paints, a heritage Lancashire brand known for its longstanding commitment to innovation in colour technology and sustainability. This pairing—of a painter of public joy with a paint manufacturer that shapes the literal colour of built environments—is a natural fit.
Titled The Colour Factory, her project comprises three main components: a permanent mural in Blackburn town centre, an interactive sculptural installation inspired by the potential of urban green spaces, and a vibrant takeover of the gallery space at Prism Contemporary. Together, these elements form a dynamic and participatory artistic experience that spreads across different corners of the town.
What distinguishes Myerscough’s practice is her dedication to community collaboration. She has led a series of creative workshops with Blackburn residents, gathering local stories, cultural inspirations, and ideas about colour, joy, and belonging. These workshops are not ancillary—they are central to the design and execution of her visual output. Through them, local people become co-authors of the work.
The permanent mural, painted using Crown Paints’ high-performance formulas, will serve as a visual beacon for the town, radiating warmth and optimism. Meanwhile, the installation and gallery takeover offer spaces for gathering, reflection, and creative expression. By rooting her work in lived experience and civic identity, Myerscough reshapes Blackburn into a town transformed by collective colour and possibility.
Liaqat Rasul: Sculpture, Memory, and Human Connection
Taking a more intimate approach to storytelling, Liaqat Rasul’s residency delves into the emotional landscapes of industrial environments. Known for his intricate, collage-based sculptures and installations that reflect on identity, heritage, and familial memory, Rasul’s artistic voice is both poetic and precise.
His residency unfolds at Herbert Parkinson, a specialist textile manufacturer and part of the John Lewis Partnership. Here, amid the weaving of curtains and crafting of soft furnishings, Rasul uncovers the deeply human layers of factory life. His project, titled Memory Threads, is rooted in empathy, listening, and a commitment to honouring untold stories.
Through a series of reflective workshops, Rasul engages with factory workers—many of whom have worked at Herbert Parkinson for decades, and whose lives are closely interwoven with the rhythms of textile production. Together, they explore personal narratives, objects of sentimental value, and cultural memory. These dialogues become the raw material for a sculptural installation that combines discarded thread, surplus fabric, and found objects from the factory floor.
The resulting work comprises a constellation of delicately balanced mobiles, each one symbolising a unique individual or shared memory. These mobiles will be suspended in a public venue during the festival, inviting quiet contemplation and emotional resonance. More than objects of beauty, they function as tributes—to the people behind the products, to the cultures woven into our homes, and to the art of attentive, collaborative creation.
The Evolution of Art in Manufacturing
Each year, Art in Manufacturing redefines what it means to create work at the crossroads of industry and imagination. The 2025 edition expands the programme’s reach and ambition by embracing large-scale commissions, long-term sustainability research, and projects rooted in community co-creation.
The artists in this cycle bring exceptional skill and perspective to their residencies. Yet what makes the work truly special is the generosity of the manufacturers themselves. These companies open their doors, share their tools, and invite artists to step into unfamiliar territory. The trust, exchange, and mutual respect that result cannot be fabricated—it must be earned.
This shared journey transforms everyone involved. Artists develop new methodologies, manufacturers see their processes through fresh eyes, and audiences experience the resulting works in surprising and often deeply personal ways.
A Festival Anchored in Place and Process
The National Festival of Making is not a traditional art event, nor a trade show, nor a local fair—it is all these things and more. Anchored in the history, culture, and evolving identity of Blackburn and Lancashire, the festival represents a living ecosystem of creativity. It merges culture with commerce, past with future, and concept with craft.
Each installation, performance, or workshop that emerges from Art in Manufacturing is embedded in the local context—not only in geography, but in narrative and spirit. These works do not arrive from elsewhere; they are grown from the landscape of lived experience, from factory floors, family stories, and hands-on experimentation.
By foregrounding materials, process, and participation, the festival invites a broader audience to engage with art not as an elite or abstract practice, but as something tangible, relevant, and rooted in everyday life.
Liaqat Rasul: Memory and Making Interwoven
In the layered corridors of Herbert Parkinson, a textile manufacturer operating within the John Lewis Partnership, Liaqat Rasul finds an archive not of documents, but of lived experience. Through his residency in the Art in Manufacturing programme at the 2025 National Festival of Making, Rasul engages not just with cloth and fibre, but with the quieter textures of identity, memory, and belonging.
Known for his poignant sculptural language that bridges collage, assemblage, and personal symbolism, Rasul approaches the factory floor as both a site of production and of intimacy. He does not merely observe the weaving of curtains or the sewing of fabrics—he listens. He listens to the people behind the machines, the hands behind the patterns, the stories embedded in the warp and weft of every spool.
His project, Memory Threads, is the culmination of weeks spent gathering fragments—tangible and intangible. Workers shared stories of family migration, of years spent perfecting a stitch, of forgotten songs sung between machines. With a deep respect for these voices, Rasul began shaping a collection of sculptural mobiles composed of salvaged materials: remnants of upholstery cloth, thread offcuts, unused pattern guides, and even personal artefacts gifted by workers.
Suspended in a quiet installation space in Blackburn, these mobiles float in gentle motion, casting shadows like memories themselves—always shifting, never still. Each piece acts as a visual elegy, inviting reflection on the often-invisible narratives of industrial life. Through these works, Rasul offers audiences not a spectacle, but a form of remembering. It is art not as object, but as witness.
Deep Listening as Artistic Practice
What makes Rasul’s approach distinct within this year’s cohort is his emphasis on listening as a creative act. His studio in the factory was often filled not with tools, but with conversation. Tea shared over folded fabric. Photographs passed from hand to hand. Journal entries from employees who rarely saw themselves as storytellers.
Through this reciprocal exchange, Rasul breaks down the artificial divide between observer and participant. His practice resists extraction—it is not about taking inspiration, but about co-creating meaning. Each person he worked with had agency, and their contributions were reflected not just in the materials used, but in the spirit of the final installation.
In an age where speed and visibility often define artistic success, Rasul’s slow, attentive methodology offers a countercurrent. His work invites us to pause, to trace the outlines of human presence in everyday production, and to realise that even a single strand of thread can carry entire histories.
The Factory as a Repository of Emotion and Experience
The Herbert Parkinson facility, nestled in Darwen, is a place of precision, pattern, and production. But through the lens of Rasul’s residency, it becomes something else: a living repository of stories. For many workers, the factory is not just a workplace—it is a second home, a generational legacy, a chapter in the unfolding novel of their lives.
Rasul’s choice of materials reflects this dual identity. He deliberately avoids pristine surfaces and instead seeks the frayed edge, the faded hue, the cut-off scrap. Each piece he includes in his mobiles carries the trace of use, of human touch, of passage through time. The work transcends decoration; it becomes a tactile archive of lived memory.
As the mobiles gently turn in the air, the threads connect not only fabrics but people—linking past and present, maker and viewer, private and public. This act of connection, humble yet profound, is at the heart of Rasul’s contribution to the festival. In celebrating the quiet dignity of labour, his art affirms that every space of making is also a space of meaning.
Breaking Down Boundaries Between Artist and Artisan
The Art in Manufacturing programme has always sought to disrupt the traditional separation between creative and industrial domains. Rasul’s residency is perhaps one of its most evocative expressions of this mission. Rather than seeing himself as an outsider entering the world of manufacturing, Rasul positions himself as a collaborator, a co-worker, and a fellow maker.
This approach fosters mutual transformation. Rasul gains access to materials, stories, and techniques that broaden his practice, while the factory workers see their environment through a refreshed lens—realising the artistic potential of their everyday actions and tools.
Festival curator Elena Jackson describes this year’s residencies as pivotal in redefining what creative-industrial collaboration can look like. The 2025 cycle explores sustainable materials, questions conventions of scale and permanence, and foregrounds emotional engagement. In this climate, Rasul’s work stands out not just for its sensitivity, but for its invitation to reimagine the factory as a site of shared authorship.
The barriers between artist and artisan dissolve, replaced by a dialogue where both sides are enriched. This ethos doesn’t just shape individual projects—it reshapes how we think about art’s role in civic and cultural life.
Material Memory and the Poetics of Labour
Rasul’s mobiles are more than decorative installations—they are poetic compositions drawn from material memory. Each piece carries the spirit of its source: the faded upholstery recalling a once-vibrant living room; the dyed thread mirroring the colours of a family celebration; the brittle paper pattern revealing the hands of a master cutter now retired.
In choosing to work with discarded or overlooked elements, Rasul aligns his practice with values of sustainability, reclamation, and emotional authenticity. Nothing is wasted—not a thread, not a word, not a memory. This approach turns the residue of manufacturing into relics of meaning.
For audiences, the experience is intimate and transformative. Standing beneath these mobiles, one is enveloped in a canopy of quiet testimony. They are not loud or imposing, but they echo deeply. They remind us that every object we use has a lineage, and that behind every finished product is a constellation of human effort.
A Festival Rooted in the Everyday and the Extraordinary
The National Festival of Making excels not simply because of its programming, but because of its perspective. It values the unseen. It elevates the overlooked. Rasul’s residency embodies this ethos with eloquence and care. His work does not seek spectacle; it seeks resonance.
In a cultural climate increasingly dominated by speed, scale, and spectacle, the festival chooses to spotlight intimacy, participation, and process. This commitment makes it not only an artistic event but a social gesture—a reaffirmation that creativity exists wherever people meet materials with care and intention.
Rasul’s Memory Threads is emblematic of the festival’s ambition to nurture deep, reflective, and community-rooted art. It asks nothing more than your attention, and in return, offers a profound meditation on what it means to make, to remember, and to belong.
Radical Pairings: Documenting a Decade of Collaboration
To commemorate nearly a decade of groundbreaking artist-industry partnerships, the National Festival of Making is preparing to unveil a landmark publication titled Radical Pairings. This richly illustrated volume is not merely a record of past achievements—it is a testament to the extraordinary potential that emerges when artistic imagination and industrial expertise meet in a shared space of experimentation.
Since its inception in 2016, the Art in Manufacturing programme has steadily gained recognition for its innovative approach to creative collaboration. By embedding contemporary artists within working factories across Lancashire, the programme has produced an array of thought-provoking artworks, installations, and interventions that explore the intersection between material production, community narratives, and cultural identity.
Radical Pairings offers readers unprecedented insight into this journey. Through essays, interviews, and case studies, the book charts the evolution of the programme from a regional experiment into a nationally acclaimed model of creative engagement. It is a publication that celebrates process as much as product, and people as much as practice.
A Decade of Embedded Creativity
The concept of embedding artists within manufacturing environments may once have seemed unconventional, but Art in Manufacturing has proven that such collaborations can be both generative and transformative. Over nine years, more than 30 artists and 20 manufacturers have participated in the programme, producing works that range from monumental ceramic sculptures to intimate textile-based installations.
The strength of these collaborations lies in their depth. Artists are not visitors—they are participants. They spend weeks or months within the factory, observing, learning, questioning, and co-creating. This immersive engagement leads to work that is layered, site-specific, and responsive to both material and social contexts.
Through this book, readers will discover how these partnerships have evolved over time, responding to changes in technology, environmental concerns, and the shifting dynamics of work and labour. Each residency reflects a distinct pairing of personalities, skills, and perspectives, and the book presents these relationships in all their complexity and richness.
Contributions from Across the Creative and Industrial Spectrum
One of the defining features of Radical Pairings is the diversity of voices it brings together. The publication includes contributions from artists, factory technicians, programme curators, cultural historians, and critical theorists. Each perspective adds nuance to the story, highlighting the different ways in which creativity and industry intersect and inform one another.
Acclaimed art critic Elizabeth Fullerton provides the opening essay, offering a wide-ranging analysis of the cultural and social implications of the programme. Her writing situates Art in Manufacturing within broader discourses around placemaking, heritage, and the evolving role of the artist in contemporary society. She considers how residencies like these can reframe our understanding of industry—not as something static or bygone, but as a space of potential, memory, and transformation.
Other contributors include participating artists who reflect on their time in residence, describing the challenges, discoveries, and unexpected relationships that shaped their projects. Manufacturers also offer insights into how the presence of artists impacted their own thinking, from the aesthetics of product design to the culture of the workspace.
Art and Industry: A Symbiotic Relationship
What emerges from the pages of Radical Pairings is not just a celebration of finished works, but a deep exploration of how collaboration itself is a form of artistry. The publication foregrounds process—the long conversations, shared meals, material tests, and design iterations that give life to the final artworks.
This emphasis on process reveals something essential: that art and industry are not opposites, but rather two ways of engaging with the world. Both require attention to detail, mastery of materials, and a willingness to embrace trial and error. Both thrive in environments of trust and exchange.
The stories collected in the book demonstrate how artists have pushed the boundaries of material use, rethinking ceramics, metals, dyes, threads, and timber in ways that manufacturers may not have imagined. At the same time, manufacturers have introduced artists to new tools, techniques, and scales of production, expanding their creative vocabulary and practical capabilities.
In this mutual transformation lies the heart of the Art in Manufacturing ethos—and the core narrative of Radical Pairings.
Beyond the Factory Floor: Expanding Cultural Infrastructure
While the immediate outcomes of the residencies are often visual installations and public artworks, the long-term impacts ripple far beyond the festival itself. Radical Pairings explores how the programme has contributed to broader cultural regeneration efforts in Blackburn and the wider Lancashire region.
By connecting artistic practice with local industry, the programme has created new pathways for cultural participation. It has helped redefine how communities engage with both heritage and contemporary expression. Factories that once operated behind closed doors have opened themselves to artistic scrutiny, storytelling, and celebration.
The publication explores how this shift has affected public perception—not only of the artists involved but of the manufacturers, their workers, and the town as a whole. As these collaborations have become more visible, they have fostered a sense of pride, belonging, and shared purpose.
In documenting these changes, Radical Pairings contributes to an ongoing conversation about the role of cultural infrastructure in regional resilience and identity. It suggests that meaningful cultural work is not always about creating something entirely new—it can also be about seeing the existing with fresh eyes and investing in the creative potential already present within communities.
A Call to Rethink Creative Collaboration
Far from being a nostalgic or celebratory publication alone, Radical Pairings is ultimately a provocation. It asks its readers to reconsider entrenched ideas about who makes art, where art happens, and what value creative labour holds in contemporary society.
It challenges institutions to think more boldly about collaboration, to consider partnerships not as strategic checkboxes but as fertile grounds for real transformation. It also encourages industries to look beyond commercial outcomes, recognising the enrichment that creative thinking can bring to workplace culture, product development, and even sustainability efforts.
For artists, the book offers a compelling invitation to step outside traditional studio contexts and into environments rich with untapped potential. For policy-makers and funders, it provides a case study in how small-scale, locally rooted programmes can have national impact through careful design, sustained relationships, and the courage to take creative risks.
In this way, Radical Pairings does not just reflect on the past—it looks squarely toward the future. It suggests a blueprint for how creativity can be woven into the very fabric of everyday life, not as a luxury or afterthought, but as an essential thread in our collective story.
Radical Pairings as a Living Document
The publication itself is thoughtfully designed to reflect the ethos it represents. It is not a glossy catalogue of finished pieces, but a tactile, thoughtfully curated object that invites interaction and reflection. Photographs of artworks are placed alongside working sketches, factory documentation, handwritten notes, and behind-the-scenes glimpses into the residencies.
The layout allows for moments of visual pause, mirroring the slow and attentive process that defines each collaboration. The text is interspersed with visual stories, moments of quiet resonance, and editorial choices that highlight the dignity of labour and the creativity of process.
This approach ensures that Radical Pairings functions not simply as a printed record but as a living document—one that continues to inspire new readers, inform future projects, and ignite dialogue across disciplines. As it travels beyond Blackburn into libraries, studios, universities, and cultural institutions, it carries with it a message: that creative collaboration is not a fleeting experiment, but a necessary practice for a more connected, resilient, and imaginative future.
The Enduring Impact of a Decade of Making
As the Art in Manufacturing programme approaches its tenth year, Radical Pairings marks a milestone moment—not as a culmination, but as a continuation. It stands as proof that creative partnerships, when cultivated with care and conviction, have the power to reshape how we see our industries, our communities, and ourselves.
For readers encountering the programme for the first time, the book offers a vivid introduction to a world where creativity thrives in the most unexpected places. For those who have followed its journey, it provides a space for reflection, recognition, and reimagining.
In the end, what Radical Pairings celebrates most is not any single artwork or event, but the spirit of collaboration itself. It honours the moments when artist and maker, thinker and technician, stranger and neighbour come together—not simply to produce, but to co-create meaning.
As the publication prepares for release during the 2025 National Festival of Making, it signals the next chapter in a growing movement. One where art and industry are no longer seen as separate domains, but as intertwined forces capable of shaping a more creative and inclusive society.
A Living Festival of People, Place, and Process
What sets the National Festival of Making apart is its living, breathing nature. This is not a static exhibition housed within white-walled galleries. It is a dispersed, participatory experience that invites people into the heart of making—whether they’re picking up a paintbrush, learning a new skill, or witnessing a monumental installation being revealed.
Every event and installation is firmly anchored in Blackburn’s identity. The town’s industrial legacy is not presented as a relic but reinterpreted as a foundation for future creativity. Through the lens of contemporary art, old mills and workshops become vibrant new cultural venues. Local residents become co-creators and collaborators. And manufacturers step into the spotlight as artists in their own right.
This year’s festival promises even more opportunities for audiences to engage directly with the processes of making. From family-friendly activities to artist-led tours and panel discussions, there is something for everyone—whether you’re interested in design, heritage, sustainability, or simply the joy of making things with your hands.
Save the Date: Festival Launches 5–6 July 2025
Blackburn will once again open its doors to artists, visitors, makers, and dreamers during the 2025 National Festival of Making, taking place on 5 and 6 July. With installations running beyond the festival weekend, it is more than an event—it is a movement, growing in ambition, scope, and national relevance each year.
If you’ve ever wanted to see where craft meets concept, where memory meets material, and where heritage meets the horizon of the future, the National Festival of Making is your destination. Set against the architectural backdrop of a town that knows the value of both history and reinvention, the 2025 edition invites you to step inside the world of making—not just as a spectator, but as a participant.
Whether you’re a seasoned artist, an industrial designer, a curious family, or someone who simply loves the tactile feel of tools, materials, and stories coming to life, Blackburn is the place to be this summer. Join a growing creative community that is reimagining not just what art can be, but where it can happen—and who gets to be part of it.
Final Thoughts:
The 2025 National Festival of Making is more than a cultural event—it is a testament to the enduring power of collaboration between seemingly different worlds. By uniting artists and manufacturers, the festival redefines the very idea of “making,” positioning it as a shared human activity rooted in creativity, craft, innovation, and care.
This year’s featured artists—Lewis Jones, Morag Myerscough, and Liaqat Rasul—each bring a unique lens to the residency experience. Their projects do more than create visual spectacle. They interrogate materials, celebrate people, and offer powerful reflections on place, sustainability, and identity. By working closely with Lancashire’s manufacturing legacy—from ceramicists and textile producers to paint specialists—they demonstrate how traditional industries can become fertile grounds for experimentation and renewal.
What makes this festival so distinct is its authenticity. Nothing feels detached or artificially placed. Every installation emerges from months of dialogue, labour, and mutual understanding between artist and artisan. The result is not just artwork, but a body of creative knowledge that belongs equally to the community, the factory floor, and the wider artistic world.
In a time when digital media often distances people from the act of creation, the National Festival of Making restores a tangible connection to materials, processes, and stories. It champions the beauty of slowness, the precision of skilled hands, and the importance of listening—to machines, to textures, and to each other.
Blackburn, once a powerhouse of the industrial revolution, now becomes a symbol of how culture and industry can evolve side by side. The town is not only hosting a festival—it is living proof that regeneration doesn’t have to mean replacement. Instead, it can mean reconnection: to heritage, to innovation, and to community.
As the 2025 edition prepares to welcome thousands of visitors, it offers a bold and hopeful vision of what making can be in our modern age. This is not just art in industry—it’s art with industry, and art for everyone.
For those seeking creativity grounded in real-world experience and stories shaped by both hand and heart, the National Festival of Making is an invitation to reimagine the future—one collaboration at a time.
