Saltaire, U.K.
Ann Hamilton says that her monumental installation We Will Sing (on view through November
2, 2025) was born the instant she entered the vast top floor of Salts Mill. The Grade II-listed, former textile mill opened in 1853, part of the model industrial village of Saltaire, itself a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2001; it now serves as an art space, with shops and restaurants. Hamilton paced the floor, clapped a rhythm, and realized that she was in a place where the “air is compressed differently,” that she needed sound to hold the space.
We Will Sing, part of Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture, is Hamilton’s first major U.K. presentation in more than 25 years and the first time the entire top floor of Salts Mill has been used to present a single artwork. This remarkable site-responsive installation layers past, present, and future, drawing on the mill’s history to create a space for visitors to be present with themselves and with others, to reflect, and take up the invitation to write a letter to the future (letters may also be submitted through the project website). It is, as Hamilton says, a work “of memory and imagination.”
Because there is no delineation between light, air, architecture, and artwork, We Will Sing appears to be alive. The fundamental nature of the work, with its gentleness and generosity, means that as visitors enter the space, the breath instantly slows in sheer wonder. Within this atmosphere of secular meditation and prayer, threads of whistling, humming, and singing provide a point of immersion unlike any other. This is a work of collective hands and voices, from schoolchildren to pensioners, from professional musicians to wool artisans and printers—each strand woven together to make the whole. By gathering voice, song, and printed word within a material surround that combines remnants of the mill’s former life (including the horns that once broadcast announcements to workers) with raw wool and newly woven wool curtains and capes produced by local textile companies, Hamilton succeeds in creating something that reaches beyond heritage. The project’s local roots lend a contemporary relevance as communities and generations come together in shared purpose and hope for the future.
The immensity should, perhaps, be overwhelming, or difficult to deal with, but it is not. Viewers effortlessly enter the fabric of the work, becoming part of its subtle interweaving of time, people, and space, as mind and body are touched by sound, color, and texture. On sunny days, light pours through the glass roof and casts crisscrossing patterns through the installation and across the floor, weaving the material and immaterial. Viewers’ meandering paths through the space create another invisible weave.
Around the space, sheep fleeces spill out like guts from metal cages. An elaborate configuration of draped blue curtains stretches out into the space, its links tethered to the floor by stones—a gesture that recalls the weights used on the first warp in the weaving process. Monumental hangings, bearing ghostly figures, become another point of bodily experience. In a fascinating play with scale, Hamilton created massively enlarged images of fèves (tiny figures of good fortune hidden inside cakes), which she discovered in the antique shop within Salts Mill. Transferred onto the woolen hangings, these blurred and evocative portraits seem to haunt the space, as visitors walk around and between them. An accompanying broadsheet, which Hamilton calls a “newspaper commons,” provides background for the project and its many parts and reproduces some of the early letters to the future; when held open, its intentionally chosen dimensions heighten bodily perception. These corporeal reminders of material, touch, and scale act to sharpen the senses within this highly charged work.
Hamilton says there is buoyancy in the space, and she is right. Within the space of We Will Sing, visitors experience a lightness of being, they seem able to locate a quiet center within themselves and find a sense of hopeful and honest possibility. One never wants to leave this environment, and yet to take its vision out into the world is to acknowledge its success, and the power behind its challenge to
the present and the future.
