Weave, Wool, and Sound: Ann Hamilton's We Will Sing
The roof space at Salts Mill, Saltaire, is magical. The 168-metres-long (one metre longer than St Paul’s Cathedral) glass-and-steel roof hovers above the flagstone floor of what was once the spinning shed. The mill, now a World Heritage Site, exhales history. It was designed by Lockwood and Mawson in 1853 as part of a model village for Sir Titus Salt. The mill ceased production in 1986, before being renovated as a gallery and retail space by Jonathan Silver in 1987. Yet its past lingers, affecting even the least sensitive souls. Artist Ann Hamilton is hardly the latter, and on her first visit in 2021, she was soon seduced by its aura.
During the pandemic lockdown, curators June Hill and Jennifer Hallam approached Hamilton in June 2021 with “an aspiration project” for Salts Mill. “We thought she would take ages to reply, but she came back to us in five days,” says Hill with a laugh. However, that was before Bradford was selected as City of Culture 2025, which means that Bradford received governmental support to celebrate its arts. Serendipitously, Hamilton was over from the United States on a walking holiday in North Yorkshire in 2022 when she heard the news in a pub that the Bradford bid was successful. She diverted to Saltaire, and her first visit was exactly a year to the day from the first email. “Ann’s participation was meant to be,” says Hill as she recounts the story of how Hamilton learned of the space. While on a trip to Japan. Hamilton, unable to get a seat on a train, went instead by taxi and, on the back seat, found a catalogue of a textile exhibition at Salts Mill. The taxi driver turned out to be an artist who had taken part in the show.
Portrait of Ann Hamilton standing in Salts roof. Photo by
Ali Hobbs.
Hamilton trained as a weaver before doing a master’s in sculpture at Yale. She went on to teach at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Since 2001, at Ohio State as a visual artist, she is known for her large-scale multimedia installations, public projects, and performance collaborations. She employs common, often disregarded materials to evoke particular places, collective voices, and communities of labour. She creates immersive experiences of transient environments that are poetic responses to their sites’ architectural presence and social history. She asks, “How does making participate in the recuperation and recognition of embodied knowledge, and what are the places and forms for live, tactile, visceral, face-to-face experiences in a media-saturated world?”
Her installations have tended to be materially intense. Today, she works with the less material acts of reading, speaking, and listening. She is intrigued by the relationship of weaving and wool to music. Her response to Salts Mill, based on four research trips, takes all these interests into account. When visiting for the first time, she exclaimed: “It’s a dream space. Can I have it all?” She has.
When visiting, it’s best to take the lift to the 4th floor, not because the walk up is too tiring, but because emerging into the vast, almost empty space is extraordinary. It contains three enormous megaphones that Hamilton discovered on site, two lights above metal frames and an expansive blue-wool curtain at one end. The megaphones broadcast a strange, eerie chant devised with and performed by Emily Engen of improvised humming, whistling, and singing of a 13th-century folk song. It is both uncanny and unnerving in the vast space that would once have throbbed and thrummed with the noise of machines.
Loom-weighted curtain, 2025. 180 metres of wool and camdeboo mohair woven by William Halstead, Bradford. Wool rope and stone weights, 12 m x 275cm. Photo: A Lycett.
The long bolts of blue woven 80 percent Super 100s wool and 20 percent camdeboo mohair textile, ( both selvedges of which are marked We Will Sing,) are strung like an enormous tent over poles. At the front, each length of cloth is scrunched up and tied to large stones on the floor. “It is tethered to the floor like the first warp was weighted by stones on the floor,” Hamilton says. The cloth was woven by William Halstead, one of two surviving weaving firms in Bradford. Hamilton was most impressed. “I never get to work with cloth of this quality,” she says. The blue fetches up on the flagstone floor like the tide rushing in and out on the shore.
The next small, dark, almost claustrophobic space, the official entrance to the show, contains six double-height stacks of fleeces, rather like sheep glimpsed through the sides of an animal transporter. The space reeks of lanolin, which seems to ooze through the flagstones.
140 raw fleece supplied by H.Dawson, Saltaire housed in original Salts Mill stillage. Photo by A Lycett.
Then comes the next shed where textile triumphs. Figures of Luck, 27 huge felted hangings, the smallest 180 x 228 cm and the largest 264 x 340 cm, are suspended from the roof girders. Each depicts what seem like fuzzy, distorted sheeplike faces. They are based on the fève or lucky charms that Hamilton discovered when rummaging through an antique shop on one of the Salts Mill’s lower floors. A fève is a tiny china figure, traditionally hidden in a Galette du Roi, eaten on the New Year in France. The finder of the fève is king for the day. Hamilton scanned each one and then enlarged the image many times; the minuscule fèves were blown up to enormous proportions.
Hamilton printed the images onto paper in her studio and then attached them to the needle-felted wool panels (which had been cut and pieced together with blanket stitch) by a second local firm, H Dawson. Near each hangs a cloak modelled on 17th-century costume, in a mix of wool, cashmere, and mohair woven by William Halstead. The whole effect is discombobulating but compulsively enticing. The images are so sheeplike and unnerving.
The final shed contains turntables relaying songs by local children, choirs, and community groups. The music is based on letters to the future written by the children. It is the least moving part of the installation, although it’s hard to resist the temptation to join in the whistling. The whole installation is accompanied by broadsheet sections of what Hamilton calls “a commonplace newspaper,” which visitors can read and collect.
The show is not immediately easy to understand. Hamilton clarifies a relationship between music and textiles; sound and individual threads are woven to create a whole song or cloth. The initial vast space seems, on first encounter, to be underused and almost disappointing. Where is the relationship to textile and the former occupants of the space, made so clear in a previous exhibition in the same space, Cloth and Memory 2013? However, given a little time, the installation becomes quite mesmerising. It makes the visitor slow down and just be. In contrast, the small, dark room of the sheep hides is claustrophobic and jolts the visitor to think about the origins of wool.
It is a brave installation, more challenging than many at the Tate Modern. Yet it grows on the visitor and persists in the mind long after leaving the building.
Written by Corinne Julius
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Further Information:
Ann Hamilton's We Will Sing is on now until November 2 at Salts Mill, Bradford. It is the artist’s first UK show in over 25 years, and her largest to date.
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Bradford 2025 City of Culture Website
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Image Credits:
Lead: One of 26 Fève images, 2025. Printed on paper, wheat pasted onto pieced and stitched felted fibre supplied by H. Dawson, Saltaire. 340 x 264cm. Photo: A Lycett.
All other images as credited in photo captions.