3 May - 2 Nov 2025
We Will Sing
Ann Hamilton
Ann Hamilton transforms the immense top floor at Salts Mill for her largest solo UK installation to date
Ann Hamilton, one of America’s most distinguished visual artists, is creating a powerful new installation for Bradford 2025 inspired by the district’s extraordinary textile heritage.
We Will Sing is the first major work created by Hamilton in the UK for more than 30 years, and the first time all three spaces on the vast top floor of Salts Mill have been combined to present a single artwork.
Salts Mill opened in 1853 as the most modern mill in Europe, and now forms the heart of the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Saltaire. Hamilton’s work is inspired by the history and the regeneration of this former textile mill, by the local contemporary wool and textile manufacturing industries, and by the people and communities who call the district home.
We Will Sing is a work of memory and imagining. Drawing on the origins of the textile processes that once filled this huge space, Hamilton’s site-responsive installation weaves together voice, song and printed word in a material surround made from raw and woven wool sourced from local textile companies H Dawson, based at Salts Mill, and William Halstead, which celebrates its 150th anniversary in 2025.
Curated by June Hill and Jennifer Hallam, We Will Sing also features a new film created by Bradford-based filmmaker Ali Hobbs that contextualises Hamilton’s practice and documents the making of the installation. A major engagement programme will include tours, readings, special events and an open invitation for us all to write a letter to the future, addressing the question at the heart of We Will Sing: What does the future need to know?
We Will Sing began the moment I first opened Salts Mill’s large wooden doors. Crossing the threshold, I felt instantly held and welcomed by an atmosphere of beauty thick with “what was” and “what might be”.
My breath slowed, my attention lingered on tables filled with beautiful books, and the sound of opera and the smell of white lilies suffused the air inside the warm stone walls. I immediately sensed this as a place of transformation committed not just to its architecture but to the future of a community and to imagination’s transformative power.
I hope my project is a small part of envisioning this possibility. It has been an honour to work with the community, to find openness and generosity, and, like all touch, to be touched in return. This exchange, this sharing, is the heart of We Will Sing.”
About the Artist
Ann Hamilton is internationally acclaimed for her large-scale multimedia installations, public projects and performance collaborations. Her site-responsive process works with common materials to invoke particular places, collective voices and communities of labour. Based in Columbus, Ohio, Hamilton has previously represented the USA at the São Paulo Biennale and the Venice Biennale, and has exhibited extensively around the world – including major commissions for the Park Avenue Armory, the Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Musée d’art contemporain in Lyon; the Art Institute of Chicago; and Tate Liverpool.
