We Will Sing

Ann Hamilton

Ann Hamilton transforms the immense top floor at Salts Mill for her largest solo UK installation to date

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Event Details

Date 3 May – 2 Nov 2025

Times Wed-Sun: 11am-4pm
Mon-Tue: Closed

Open most bank holiday Mondays.

Location Salts Mill

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Ann Hamilton, one of America’s most distinguished visual artists, presents 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.

Artist Ann Hamilton stands among the blue material that makes up the giant curtain in We Will Sing

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 features vocal and music collaborations with Emily Eagen and a new film created by Bradford-based filmmaker Ali Lycett that contextualises Hamilton’s practice and documents the making of the installation. A major engagement programme includes 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?

Artist Ann Hamilton, with short white hair and wearing a dark coat, gestures thoughtfully while seated at a table covered in papers, a tablet, and writing tools. She is in the expansive, light-filled interior of Salts Mill in Saltaire, a historic industrial building with high ceilings and exposed beams.

Opening times

We Will Sing in Salts Mill is open from Wednesday to Sunday, and closed on Monday and Tuesday.

Salts Mill is open most bank holiday Mondays. Please check the Salts Mill website for the most up to date seasonal opening times including school holiday hours.

Salts Mill opening times ↗

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.”

Ann Hamilton

Artist

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.

Write a letter to the future

Hamilton is inviting us all to write a Letter to the Future, connecting our memories of the past and what we love about the present to tomorrow’s world and the people who’ll live in it. What do you think the future needs to know? What would you share with it, and what could you teach it?

Watch an invitation from Ann Hamilton below and submit your letter to the future.