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?”...
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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.