We Will Sing was a site responsive installation created by artist Ann Hamilton across the vast upper floor of Salts Mill for Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture. Inspired by the textile processes that once filled Salts Mill, Hamilton’s lyrical project wove relationships between the atmospheres of the architectural spaces and the tactility of voices and images with the hand of wool cloth from local textile companies H. Dawson and William Halstead.

We Will Sing, a work of memory and imagining honoured the district’s heritage as a world centre of the woollen industry, with wool raw and woven 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 resonated with sound, created by Hamilton with vocalist Emily Eagen. In the former spinning room, once filled with the deafening noise of machinery, audiences heard Eagen’s improvisational humming, whistling, and singing of a 13th-century English folk song, projected from the mill’s original revolving horn speakers. On the canal side of the mill, vinyl records played a “song for the future”, jointly composed from recordings made with the local community during workshops and at Heaton St Barnabas’ C of E Primary School, Titus Salt School, Heaton St Barnabas Armchair Aerobics Group and Friends, Song-Geet, and See and Know Toddler Group at St Peter’s, Shipley.

By contrast, the middle roof space was materially dense, containing a forest of large felt mounted images that Hamilton called “figures of luck.” The relationship between the gigantic and the miniature had long interested Hamilton, and her discovery of fève figures at Salts Mill stimulated these works. Small ceramic figures traditionally baked into cakes as symbols of good fortune, the fèves were scanned and enlarged to monumental size, forming an audience for the community of readers invited to sing or read to the future as part of the ongoing animation of the project.

For Hamilton, cloth and choral music are intrinsically tactile and democratic, each formed from individual threads or voices. This was how We Will Sing was made: a weaving of separate voices, creating a chorus. Throughout the exhibition, visitors were invited to take a free We Will Sing broadsheet newspaper and to contribute their voices using the letter-writing boards, sharing something they loved that they believed the future needed to know and remember as a place of possibility.