The artwork Tower by Steve Messam, in the landscape of Penistone Hill. The large sculpture is covered in sheep fleece, creating the shape of an arch with angular corners, set against a cloudy sky and the natural landscape.

24 May – 12 Oct 2025

Wild Uplands

Striking new art for the moors above Haworth.

Wild Uplands was a series of new artworks created for the vast skies and expansive moorland views of Penistone Hill Country Park.

Shanaz Gulzar, Creative Director of Bradford 2025 and the curator of Wild Uplands, invited four leading artists – Monira Al Qadiri, Meherunnisa Asad with Studio Lél, Vanessa da Silva and Steve Messam – to create new artworks for Penistone Hill. Their artworks took inspiration both from this natural landscape and from our shared industrial heritage; from true stories and imagined fables; and from the history of this countryside and its potential future in light of the climate crisis. Wild Uplands also included Earth and Sky, an immersive sound walk created with Opera North that you could listen to as you explored this landscape.

The artists

Tower

Steve Messam

Tower explores the building blocks of the Penistone Hill landscape and their relationship to the building of Bradford.

The 10m sculpture is clad in the raw fleece of Derbyshire Gritstone and Lonk, two sheep breeds common to the local area. This fleece cladding is inspired both by the role played by sheep in physically shaping and maintaining the surrounding landscape, and by the importance of wool in the industrial history of Bradford – not for nothing was it nicknamed the ‘Wool Capital of the World’.

The structure itself is created from block forms drawn from the stone quarrying of Penistone Hill Country Park – another physical building block of the city, which can seen as a product of the wilder landscapes that surround its urban core.

Steve Messam is an environmental artist based in rural County Durham. His site-specific installations reimagine the everyday, interrupting protected landscapes and historical architecture to help us look at familiar environments in new ways. Previous works include ‘PaperBridge’ (2015), a functioning packhorse bridge in the Lake District made from 22,000 sheets of paper, and ‘Hush’ (2019), a lead-mining scar in the North Pennines filled with more than five kilometres of saffron-yellow fabric.

99 Butterflies

Meherunnisa Asad, Studio Lél

99 Butterflies is inspired by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s haunting question: “Where will we go after the last frontiers? Where will the birds fly after the last sky?” Exploring displacement, sanctuary and longing, it’s the work of Studio Lél, founded in Peshawar, Pakistan by Farhana Asad and now led by her daughter, Meherunnisa Asad.

Muamba Posy

Vanessa da Silva

Muamba Posy is a series of interactive sculptures that reflect on the ever-changing cycles of nature on Penistone Hill, where life has adapted and transformed over time. Each sculpture invites us to explore the connections between sculpture, the human body and the natural world.

Muamba Posy draws inspiration from this landscape’s long-distant past – some 300 million years ago, when Penistone Hill was a tropical paradise. The sculptures evoke the oversized plants and vibrant wildlife that once thrived here, while also taking inspiration from heather, bilberries, tomentils, damselflies and other plants and creatures that define this landscape today. The metallic shades of the sculptures are a nod to the metal-loving plants that thrive in the area’s mineral-rich soil, an often-overlooked but important part of life on the hill.

These artworks invite us to pause, connect with nature and reflect on our relationship with the world around us, and encourage us to develop a deeper understanding of our connection to the environment.

Vanessa da Silva is a São Paulo-born, London-based artist who works across sculpture, textiles, installation and performance. Drawing inspiration from dance, Brazilian art history and the natural world, Da Silva’s work explores such themes as nationality, identity, migration and displacement.

The Children of Smokeless Fire

Monira Al Qadiri

The Children of Smokeless Fire is a work of mystery and magic with two distinct inspirations: the famous ‘Cottingley Fairies’, created by two Bradford girls in 1917, and the Djinns, mythical beings depicted in a 13th-century Islamic manuscript by Zakariya al-Qazwini.

The Cottingley Fairies were the creation of Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, who copied fairies from a children’s book, cut out their drawings and photographed them in Elsie’s garden. Intended as a playful prank, their images became a sensation after an article by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle claimed them as evidence of a hidden spiritual realm.

The fairies have a precursor of sorts in the Djinns, supernatural beings said to be formed from smokeless fire. The Djinns were depicted alongside animals and plants by Zakariya Al-Qazwini some 750 years ago in The Wonders of Creation and the Oddities of Existence, and show how medieval scholars combined empirical observations with spiritual dimensions. The Children of Smokeless Fire draws inspiration from this interplay between belief and scepticism – placing Djinn cutouts in natural environments to spark the same sense of wonder as did the Cottingley Fairies 100 years ago.

Monira Al Qadiri is a Kuwaiti artist, now based in Berlin, whose multifaceted practice is mainly based on research into the cultural histories of the Gulf region.

Wild Uplands Digital

In this digital version of Wild Uplands you can learn about the artists and their work, with exclusive interviews, insights and thoughts directly from the artists as well as bespoke videos, photos and audio descriptions.

You can also listen to the compositions and poetry from the Earth & Sky soundwalk.

Explore Wild Uplands Digital ↗

A view across the moors from Penistone Hill. A woman sits alone on a rock looking at the view.

Earth & Sky

Earth & Sky is a new sound walk created for Penistone Hill Country Park.

Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture and Opera North invited composers Caterina Barbieri, Nyokabi Kariũki and Gwen Siôn to create new music and sound works inspired by this landscape. Their creations have been woven together with field recordings by Sarah Keirle and performances by the Orchestra of Opera North of music by local composer Frederick Delius into a dramatic soundscape.

Earth & Sky used state-of-the-art geolocation technology. As you walked through the landscape, what you heard was triggered by every step you took.

Explore Earth & Sky →