We Will Sing Anne Hamilton, curated by June Hill and Jen Hallam, Third of May until the second of November. 2025 We Will Sing has been commissioned and produced by Bradford. 2025 UK city of culture in partnership with Salts Mill. This audio description has been written and recorded by Jo and Owen from Bradford 2025, the community trainee audio description team.

We Will Sing a site responsive installation created by artist Anne Hamilton across the vast upper floor of Salts Mill for Bradford 2025, UK City of Culture is inspired by the textile processes that once filled this mill within the mill’s three distinct spaces. Hamilton’s lyrical project weaves relationships between the tactility of cloth, voice, and image, working with materials from local textile companies H Dawson and William Halstead. Hamilton’s project, We Will Sing, honours the district’s heritage as a world centre of the woollen industry, with wool, raw, unwoven, figuring prominently as fleece, curtain clothing, and felted image. In Hamilton’s words, wool, central to innovative work on regenerative practices in textiles, farming, and land husbandry, is the past and the future. Two of the roof spaces resonate with sound created by Hamilton with vocalist Emily Egan. In the former spinning room once filled with the deafening sound of machinery, we hear Egan’s improvisational humming, whistling and singing projected from the mill’s original horn speakers reinstalled on three vertical poles that punctuate the space on the canal side of the mill.

Vinyl records play a song for the future, jointly composed from recordings made with the local community during workshops led by Emily Egan with Heaton St Barnabas C of E primary school, Titus Salt School, Heaton St Barnabas Armchair Aerobics group and Friends Song Keat and C&O toddler group at St Peter’s Shipley. In contrast, the middle roof space is materially dense, containing a forest of large felt mounted images Hamilton calls figures of luck. The relationship between the gigantic and the miniature has long interested Hamilton and her discovery of fair figures at Salts Mills stimulated these works, small ceramic figures traditionally baked into cakes as symbols of good fortune. The fifths have been scanned and printed at monumental scale and mounted on a felted wool backing for Hamilton. Cloth and choral music are intrinsically tactile and democratic, each formed in the crossing of individual threads or voices. This is how we will sing. Has been made by weaving space material, voice and image to create an atmosphere of choral invitation.

The We Will Sing broadsheet newspaper located throughout the project accompanies the installation with images from local archives, histories, stories and letters related by association to elements in the installation, please take one or all of the 22 individual sheets. Also located throughout the project are wooden benches inviting you to pause, sit and listen. Some of the benches have clipboards with pens, paper and an invitation to write a letter to the future. Please contribute by sharing something you love, something you think the future might need to know and remember. Letters gifted to the project are collected and read in the middle room and posted to an online Tumblr site for wider sharing. Please ask one of the volunteers to help if you’d like to participate.

For more information, visit the making of We Will Sing, which includes a short film about the process located on the ground floor by the main entrance. If you arrive via the lift, you will enter directly into the vast space that once housed the mills spinning machines. The exposed pale grey and cream stone of the walls still bears traces of the many paint layers over the intervening decades, creating tattered splashes of hospital green and off white. The floor, composed of slate grey flagstones, has been polished by wear from the many feet of workers and now visitors that have travelled this space above skylights run the length of the room and cast strong paths of light into the eaves supported by a lattice of criss crossing metal rods. Wooden benches punctuate the length of the interior wall. Three trumpet shaped speakers mounted to vertical poles now stand as turning figures in the sky. Base, the directional sounds of the slow circling horns project onto and from the long surrounding walls to layer echo, reverberate and amplify in the space. Stepping out of the lift into this wall of sound can be quite overwhelming. These megaphone shaped horns in their original chipped and distressed paint, are mounted near chest height on a slowly turning floor to ceiling metal pole, a screen enclosure at the base of the pole houses, the motor generating the Horn’s revolving movements. One horn turns clockwise. Two horns turn counter clockwise, if we stand with our backs to the left, to the right are two metal stillages holding newspaper pages related to spinning and wool. At the far left end of the room, stretching the width of the space, is a large blue wool and mohair curtain composed of individual widths of woven yardage.

The front facing sections drape and split around the joints in the roof’s overhead structure, and then extend long fingers into the space in irregular lengths, tethered with wool rope and weighted by rounded stones to the floor. Although this beautiful cloth, generously supplied by William Halstead, celebrating their 100th and 50th anniversary, is finally finished with contemporary equipment. The stones nod to the history of warp weighted looms that use stones to hold the vertical threads in tension. The back side of the curtain hangs to pull slightly on the floor, forming a more conventional looking curtain openings between the selvedge edges reading, We Will Sing Salts Mill Bradford 2025 and frame a view of the rotating horn speakers in the space beyond. If you are entering the rooftop space from the stairwell, you can hear the project before you arrive at it. The stairwell brings us into the room under the mill’s water tank, dark with a low ceiling, light and sound from either side call for your attention, emanating from the former spinning room and the single doorway to your right are the Sung, whistled, and hummed vocals of Emily Egan in front of you. At the far end of the room, an impartial shadow, are six stacks of open-sided metal crates called stilages, which were used in the mill’s manufacturing days, stuffed with freshly sheared, raw fleece; the space is filled with the earthy smell of their natural lanolin.

The interpretation of We Will Sing is detailed on the wall to the right, illuminated by three hanging hood lights, also original features from the mill. The cement floor is worn and cracked. This along with the large steel beams and exposed pipe work above, remind us of the industrial history of the building. Two large doorways with sliding bright red doors stand to your left. These two arched entrances lead into the project’s middle room. Skylight Windows run down one side of the room’s length and illuminate the space in swaths of direct sunlight, in contrast to the lattice structure in the spinning room. This room’s higher ceilings house heavy wooden beams forming a triangular roof. The beams arch down where they join the exposed stone walls and connect to the concrete floor, the original oversized weighing scale, the only piece of original machinery remaining in the room is still positioned near the left entryway. Standing near this entrance, we face a field of giant portrait like images of painted figurines suspended with rope from the overhead beams, the felted prints rest on the floor an obscure, full view of a space whose depth only becomes apparent as you continue your way through the room’s forest of images aligned with the mill’s gabled roof. Some of the prints are taller and wider, while some are shorter and narrower. The feve prints are legible but blurry, the result of enlarging a very small object to epic scale, the process of flatbed scanning has left only select features registered in focus, while the rest of the figure fades into the background. The source of these images are the miniature hand painted ceramic figures traditionally baked into King’s cakes; the person finding a Fave in their piece of cake is promised good fortune for the year. In this way, Hamilton has come to think of them as figures of luck. Examples of these tiny faves, which you were invited to see and handle, are in the booth near the entrance.
The faves scanned for this installation was sourced by Hamilton on her first visit to the mill from the antique shop on the third floor, each figure, floating in a blue grey atmosphere, has been printed on cotton paper and mounted with wheat paste to large sheets of felted wool produced by H Dawson, a company based within the mill the. Images take on the different textures and densities of the felted and patchworked wall. In this sense, the human images are melded with the animal wool felt and plant paper and paste materials that carry and hold them. 30 faves were selected for the project, and each wool and paper tarp carries a different image. The original miniatures all have porcelain white bodies with brightly painted clothes with a few It is unclear if they have the face of a human or an animal, made harder to distinguish by the fact that the subtle inaccuracies of painting something miniature is exaggerated in their new more monstrous scale. Each figure has a unique expression, but rather than representing a particular person, these figures of look are a collection of human like characters.

The first image we encounter could be that of a woman, but the face has distinctly sheep like features, small black eyes and nose. It wears a bonnet and a yellow top with a blue shawl. Its face is tilted and seems to be looking down towards us. Further on, we come across a regal looking feve in a bright blue blazer with black trim, white shirt and red trousers. It is wearing a black hat above its long white face with small, black eyes and slightly wonky nose. Next to each of the prints is a bell, or set of bells, hanging from the roof’s wooden beams like the warp thread of a loom. Lines from each bell run parallel along the length of the room, terminating in a small pre existing wooden building, an artefact of the former mill that sits near the entrance of the space, perhaps a former office for a manager.

This open, windowed, low, ceilinged room has been repurposed as a boob for the project’s readers, with a microphone shelf and stool, two lines strung across the back wall of the small room are draped with strips of brightly coloured wool cloth, seated and facing, the prints filling the room a custodian or volunteer reads from the project’s newspaper, selected books and letters scribed to the future. Readers might choose to ring a bell to signify a specific feve they’ve selected as the subject of their address. The letters to the future have been written by guests and placed in a wire basket hanging off the side of the booth and later mounted in a recycled textile sample book from which the volunteer reads the letters begin with a prompt, Dear future I want you to know and have been written by guests and placed in a wire basket hanging off the side of the booth and later mounted in a recycled textile sample book from which the volunteer reads these letters gifted to the project, their different papers and handwritings, their individual memories and imagining are the ongoing life that animates and creates inside the public hours of the installation, the cadence and rhythm of the voice reading is the project’s third aural element, and in this room, it layers with the more distant sounds faintly heard from the spinning room.

If you listen carefully when the space is quiet, if you listen carefully when the space is quiet, the choral singing issuing from records in the distant third room of the installation at the far end of this space can also be heard behind each image is a waist high stillage, the same structure seen stacked and filled with wool in the previous room, draped over the top rung of each stillage is a unique broadsheet newspaper, one of 22 individual sheets printed for the Project by the local newspaper, The Telegraph & Argus. The broadsheets are comprised of images and essays associatively related to the elements. In the project, there is a recipe for a king’s cake, essays on wool and letter writing textile sample, book pages, letters to the future and more. You are welcome to collect and take each of the sheets, in addition to the newspaper; some of the stillages have a tall corner pole with a hook for a cloak. The cloaks are sewn with fine wool, manufactured by the Bradford based company William Halstead. And although they vary in colour, they are all related in style to the Dorothy capes manufactured by the utopian community in America, known as the Shakers and named after one of its members.

The communitarian shakers were founded by Dorothy Lee of Manchester, England. The capes in this project all have two tones with a different colour lining showing around the edges and the inside of the hoods. Although these capes are not meant to be worn by visitors, one can imagine the feeling of being wrapped in their protective warmth, a warmth perhaps related to being immersed and held by the reading of a good story. Next to each cloak hangs a worn grey industrial hood lamp, originally used in the mill. These lamps illuminate the stack of newspapers and the blank. Surface of the white wall that backs each of the feathers, creating a small Tableau hidden behind each print. As we make our way through this room, we begin to hear singing coming from the end of the building access through either of the two archways at the back of the room that we have just traversed. This is a smaller empty attic space on the canal side of the building. The room’s U shape allows for visitors to travel from one archway to the other, meanwhile, passing the three sets of record players, each playing sections of a choral piece. The walls of the space are stone in varying hues of grey, brown, yellow and gold. At either far end, light comes from pairs of arch lattice windows set high in the walls. These four windows bring in light but no view on the outside wall. At the centre of the space are two solid wooden doors. Historically, these would have been opened when raw materials arrived by boat and were hoisted up into the mill for processing.

The upper section of the right hand door has been opened to make the view to the landscape visible, and although not an object, this opening to the outside is a central element of the project, as with the other rooms, skylights run the length of the roof nearest the canal side of the space, and a series of wooden benches line the room. This room has six stillage structures mirroring the formal relationship of the windows. They sit in pairs in front of each of the paired windows and are evenly spaced at the left centre and right of the room. Open frame turntables incorporated into the base of each of these six stillages are precisely timed to synchronise the six records pressed with the songs created and recorded in community workshops led by Hamilton and vocalist Emily Egan. The 18 minute resultant composition we will sing is split across the six records. Some song sections play from each of the records in unison, while other phrases move between the records, so that at times, a single phrase seems to travel across the room from one set of records to another. A several minute interlude of solo whistling marks the end and beginning of the composition, as in the other two rooms, grey industrial hood lights are suspended over each of the stillages and illuminate the records as they turn. The journey of this piece began in the harmonies of the solo vocalist at the far opposite end of the building, and ends here with a collaboratively created choral composition and a view of the Bradford hills. If sound is how we touch at a distance, We Will Sing is its tactile weaving.

Thank you for visiting a Bradford 2025 audio described event.