In a city that once spun more cotton than anywhere else on earth, the threads have not gone silent. They have simply changed register – from the thunderous looms of Ancoats to the quiet hum of a 3D printer rendering a Qing Dynasty dragon robe in PLA filament. Threads of Connection, a collaboration between Manchester Museum, the School of Digital Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University, and PrintCity, is not the first project to bridge heritage and technology. But it may be the most intimate, because it began not with a funding bid or a curatorial strategy, but with a museum volunteer asking a simple question: what if the objects behind the glass could speak to us now?
That volunteer was Katerina Karp, a visual artist and journalist who had been taking part in the Boost Your Volunteer Opportunities training programme run by Manchester Adult Education. Her “exam project” was a proposal to connect the Chinese Culture Gallery’s textile artefacts with digital creation tools at SODA. The idea snowballed. Within months, it had become a structured collaboration in which second-year SODA students reinterpret five objects – a Dragon Robe, Shoes for Bound Feet, a Firefighter’s Smart Jacket, a scroll of Emperor Kangxi’s birthday procession, and a landscape installation on the Loess Plateau – using 3D fabrication, digital storytelling, and multimedia narrative. The process is documented in real time on Instagram, and a digital showcase and in-gallery display were mounted at Manchester Museum in December 2025.
The Gallery That Bridges Two Worlds
The Lee Kai Hung Chinese Culture Gallery, where the five objects reside, is itself an exercise in connection. Opened in February 2023 as part of Manchester Museum’s £15 million “hello future” redevelopment, the gallery houses over 300 objects across 190 square metres. It was developed in partnership with the University of Manchester’s Manchester China Institute and funded by the Lee Kai Hung Foundation. Its curatorial thesis is emphatically not “look at these beautiful old things.” Instead, as the gallery’s official description puts it, the space highlights “personal stories of migration, friendships and collaboration to inspire empathy and build understanding.”
Bryan Sitch, the gallery’s former curator, told China Daily in January 2025 that the thematic approach – environment, experiment, movement and migration, trading activities, and healthcare – was chosen specifically to build empathy. “These are all very important themes that we use to help build a sense of empathy with the visitors, so that they will have a better understanding of Chinese culture,” he said. “And in that way, we will bring about better understanding between people from China and the United Kingdom.”
The gallery sits on the first floor of the museum, a Grade II listed building on Oxford Road that reopened after a two-year closure. Manchester Museum now describes itself as aiming to become “the most inclusive, imaginative and caring museum you’ll ever visit.” The Chinese Culture Gallery is one of its most visible experiments in that direction – a permanent space where cultural exchange is not a wall text but a lived curatorial principle.
Cottonopolis and Its Ghost
To understand why a textile project carries particular resonance in Manchester, you need to know about Cottonopolis. The nickname emerged in the mid-nineteenth century as the city and its surrounding mill towns – Oldham, Bolton, Blackburn, Burnley – became the spinning and weaving capital of the world. By the 1850s, over 100 cotton mills operated within Manchester’s boundaries. In 1871, the region processed 32 per cent of global cotton production. The wealth was enormous; the exploitation that produced it – enslaved labour on American plantations, child labour in Lancashire mills – was equally vast.
That history is not abstract in Manchester. The Science and Industry Museum’s permanent Textiles Gallery tells it explicitly: “In 1860, over 80% of the cotton processed in mills in and around Manchester was grown by enslaved African people on plantations in the southern United States.” The gallery, which includes an original Richard Arkwright Water Frame, frames cotton not as a neutral commodity but as a system of global entanglement. A parallel exhibition at the John Rylands Research Institute and Library, Cottonopolis: The Origins of Global Manchester (November 2025–May 2026), curated by Professor Edmond Smith, traces the city’s explosive industrial growth through links to India, Africa, and America.
Threads of Connection does not explicitly position itself within this historiography. But the resonance is inescapable. The Dragon Robe in the gallery, made for Duanfang, a prominent Chinese governor assassinated during the 1911 Revolution, arrived in Britain via missionary John Rodwell – a journey that mirrors the extractive routes of cotton itself. The 22-metre Emperor Kangxi scroll, loaned by the John Rylands Library, depicts a bustling Beijing street scene, but its British provenance speaks to Manchester’s own textile-driven global entanglements. As Karp wrote in her December 2025 essay for Creativity’s UK: “Just as the scroll depicts networks of trade and movement in 18th-century Beijing, its British provenance reflects Manchester’s own global textile entanglements, including industrial wealth built on cotton and the exploitation embedded within it.”
SODA: A School Built for This Moment
The other half of the collaboration is SODA, the School of Digital Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University. Opened in autumn 2021 after a £35 million investment, SODA is a purpose-built interdisciplinary school designed by Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios. Its northern façade features a four-storey LED media wall that displays student work to the public – a building that literally announces its creative output to the city.
SODA spans film, animation, UX design, photography, sound design, gaming, and AI. Professor Jill Griffiths, Head of the School, has described it as a place “where new technology inspires new ideas, and even new realities. Where imagination is an occupation.” The school collaborates with industry partners to ensure graduates have industry-ready skills, and its location on the Oxford Road Corridor – adjacent to MediaCityUK, the BBC, and ITV – positions it at the heart of Greater Manchester’s creative economy.
For the Threads of Connection project, SODA students work in small interdisciplinary teams, emulating professional creative studios. They follow an Insight-Text-Image methodology developed by Karp: research the historical and cultural context of each artefact, develop narratives that humanise the objects, experiment with creative expression (digital storytelling, 3D fabrication, textile design), and produce outputs for public exhibition. The process mirrors what real creative agencies do – brief, research, iterate, present – and gives students professional-quality portfolio work alongside public exposure.
Debbie Bandara, an award-winning artist, creative producer, and lecturer at SODA, serves as Academic Lead. Hazel Ng, Manchester Museum’s Producer specialising in Chinese cultural heritage, ensures cultural integrity. The three-person leadership team – Karp as Creative Director, Bandara as Academic Lead, Ng as Cultural Producer – embodies the project’s core thesis: that heritage activation works best when it is driven by genuine cross-institutional collaboration rather than top-down curatorial decree.
Five Objects, Five Threads
The five objects chosen for the project are not random selections from storage. Each carries a distinct narrative weight. The Qing Dynasty Dragon Robe, embroidered with imperial dragons, waves, and auspicious clouds, embodies power and cosmic order – but also fracture, since Duanfang’s career ended in assassination during the collapse of imperial China. The Shoes for Bound Feet, collected in 1947 by Mary Gavin Clarke, headmistress of Manchester High School for Girls, prompt discussions about beauty standards, bodily constraint, and gendered power. The Firefighter’s Smart Jacket, developed by Professor Henry Yi Li and his team at the University of Manchester as part of the EU-funded H2020 ETexWeld project, embeds sensors and antennas that monitor heart rate, breathing, body temperature, and stress – transforming clothing from passive barrier to active health partner. The Emperor Kangxi Birthday Scroll, a 22-metre ink-and-paper panorama from the John Rylands Library, captures the social fabric of eighteenth-century Beijing. The Loess Plateau installation tells an ecological story of destruction and restoration through terracing and tree planting.
Together, they form what Karp calls a “transhistorical tapestry” – objects created across centuries and with different intentions entering a shared dialogue. The students’ digital reinterpretations become a sixth thread: a generational layer that connects emerging creators with ancient techniques, ancestral stories, and future possibilities.
What Heritage Looks Like When It Breathes
The project’s most radical proposition is not technological. It is relational. By unfolding the creative process on Instagram (@threads_of_connection_MM) and on the project’s website, Threads of Connection rejects the traditional museum model in which objects are researched, interpreted, and presented to a passive public. Instead, the public watches the interpretation happen – meets the students, follows the experimental failures and breakthroughs, sees how a Qing robe becomes a 3D-printed sculpture or how a firefighter’s jacket inspires a multimedia narrative about care and protection.
This is not unprecedented. Museums worldwide have been experimenting with digital engagement and co-creation for years. What distinguishes Threads of Connection is its scale and its origin. It was not conceived by a museum director or funded by a major grant. It grew from a volunteer’s curiosity, a lecturer’s willingness, and a curator’s open door. In a sector often paralysed by bureaucracy and risk aversion, that organic provenance is itself a statement about how cultural institutions can remain relevant.
Manchester’s textile heritage is not a relic. It is a living system – one that connects factories to galleries, students to curators, Qing Dynasty silks to 3D-printed PLA. The threads have not broken. They have simply found new patterns to weave – patterns that echo the city’s broader creative reinvention, where heritage and avant-garde now share the same floor.
