A Narrative Textile Design Project for What If?
I met Pauline Johnstone from What If? when I was doing some free, drop-in screen printing sessions on Edgeley’s Castle Street. Pauline and Stockport Council had asked me to develop some simple visual motifs to represent areas like Castle Street, Hollywood Park and Alexandra Park. We had a mad, messy time, screen printing onto paper and fabric with kids who could barely reach the table; pensioners leant over from their mobility scooters and everyone in between.
Later, I did some more development and research work when we used Edgeley as a jumping off subject for a free bookmaking workshop at What If?. I did more research and eventually made this concertina book about the Edgeley bleach works. It’s an area with an incredible history (like most places, when you give them a good scratch) – not least, the Brinksway Caves. Which were once a brothel, then a clay pipe factory, then an air raid shelter and – if you believe in these things – home to a fair few ghosts.
What If? – the building, the idea – is now the brainchild and baby of three visionary women; Aiofe, Kirsty and Pauline. Their aim is to rescue, restore and re-enervate a historic Victorian building in Edgeley so that it is resilient to climate change and becomes a place truly embedded in the community where anyone can rest and play. Not lip service; properly bound to and reflective of the people and place.
In 2025 What If? secured funding to help protect the building’s thermal barrier. They needed their wonderful main hall to be darker and warmer for community events (like their cinema nights, run by Brinksway Cinema). On a practical level, this funding meant they were now able to retrofit some secondary glazing to their huge windows. It also meant they could afford to take down their particularly heinous 90s curtains and ask me to make some new ones.
What if they’re not just curtains?
Pauline told me in an early meeting about getting lost in a pattern as a child – staring at curtains or wallpaper and imagining yourself in it, spotting all the things, using it as a kind of map for mental play. Childhood boredom is good for this sort of thing and I sometimes do it myself when stuck in a meeting or sitting through a performance after my kid has done the bit I actually came to see. How many pews are there in this room; what if I find something in this room for every letter of the alphabet; &c. Pauline described looking at some patterns and not being able to resolve what they were all about, walking along the shapes in her mind whilst the adults got on with stuff. And I loved that idea – a textile that felt like a puzzle.
It also needed to be something that wasn’t purely decorative (though they needed to be that as well). A textile where every element of the design had purpose and referred to somewhere or something particular. So I took a lot of photographs of the What If? building itself, the streets surrounding it, Hollywood Park and Castle Street. The idea was: what if these curtains could tell a story that the people of the area could recognise or feel ownership of. What if this fabric could keep people warm, but also reflect who it was warming and where? I gathered as many reference points as I could.
Sometimes this meant looking at the area from above, using satellite images to pick out shapes and places that could combine to make a cohesive print.
Printmaking Improv
We decided to get the fabric digitally printed by Maake, whose social responsibility angle seemed like a good fit. Printing on luxurious and cosy deadstock chenille, I knew the fabric would naturally have a texture because it had pile. But I also know from teaching many, many, many screen printing classes that texture in printmaking is more than just about your substrate. You have to find ways to create interest and snag the eye in other ways (and I didn’t want to fake that texture digitally). Screen printing is wonderful for delivering a flat splash of colour, but textiles are all about texture