Memory, Love and the Future: Ann Hamilton’s ‘We Will Sing’ at Salts Mill – Review

Spinning Room. Image Credit: Ann Hamilton Studios.

(And I believe in the future
We shall suffer no more
Maybe not in my lifetime
But in yours, I feel sure 

Paul Simon – The Cool, Cool River)

A 1000-word review can never do justice to an art exhibition on this huge scale and of such creative complexity. Other reviewers – professionals and amateurs alike – have described their perspectives beautifully already here, here and here. Oh, and here. For more information about the exhibition, it is a very good idea to watch Ali Hobbs (Lycett)‘s brilliant 15-minute preview here. What follows is merely a selection of my perspectives from within the exhibition, in which I participated as a reader. My readings ran 11am to 1pm on Fridays. I did not meet the artist, Ann Hamilton, until the last of those Fridays, which happened to be Halloween, and we met again 2 days later on 2 November for the closing event, after which, despite her emotional and mental exhaustion, she very generously granted TSOTA an interview (presented full-length, warts-and-all here), which explores some more of my perspectives, and hers.  This conversation tied up lots of loose ends for me, having come to know the space she had filled with her art, and I felt that every week, either side of reading in the allotted booth, I was moving around in a multitude of lives and visions, presented in the imagination of the as-yet-to-me-unknown artist.

History is my subject, and I feel the history in places like Salts Mill anyway, but Ann had organised those feelings and at the same time encouraged me to dream up other ones. This is what the best artists do. Taking my place in that reading-booth every week made me feel not only part of her art but also part of History, and part of my adopted West Yorkshire community. 

In front of me, hanging from the rafters, were wool rugs bearing representations of people which had been blown up to 10’x10′ (at a guess from memory) from the original fèves – tiny French figurines the size of a bean (they were originally beans, cognate with the word fava). I would ring a bell, by pulling a cord which travelled to the tops of these rugs, which would theoretically alert one of them that I would be reading to them (each had their own cord). In Ali’s film, Ann looks at one and says “She’s quite something, huh?” These rugs and their fève originals reminded me of a framed picture I had at home, produced by my friend, artist and poet Tom Senior, in 2018, the year before he died tragically, aged 43 – I had been in his flat next to his work-desk, messing about with a small piece of blue-tac, which I accidentally worked into something I reckoned looked like a mother and her swaddled child. He told me I was talking nonsense, but a few weeks later – and this was the sort of person he was – he made a gift to me of a picture of my ham-fisted sculpture blown up to A4 size and framed. I took this to the closing event to show Ann, and told her how it moved me to see it as a response to her figures, a friends’ daft joke turned into memory and love. “Memory and love is all we have, isn’t it?” she said.

Normandie Room. Image Credit: Ann Hamilton Studios.

One week, I asked someone else to read for a few minutes so I could walk towards the back of the long middle room – perhaps the length of a football pitch – to find out how far our voices were travelling. At about half the length of this room, our sound was gradually deadened, I guess by all those thick wool rugs. Beyond, there was an end room, with views to the canal and to Hope Hill opposite. Here, old gramophones were set up, with recordings made by local children, local adult choirs and others. The sounds, though modern, had the eerie feel that they might have dated back to the mill’s 19th century heyday.

Returning to the booth, all the sound I could hear changed from a garble into a symphony: the gramophones at the back, the reader in the booth, the hubbub from the public milling (geddit?) around the space, the astonishing and haunting sounds of master vocalist and whistler Emily Eagen, and a siren song drifting in from the main spinning room behind us through old announcement horns from the working mill (this room is 168 metres long, longer than St Paul’s Cathedral, and more like two football pitches). Resuming my reading, my own voice felt different. I became more mindful of the need to choose the material I read even more carefully. I always fetched a bag of poetry books and, while many of these were local writers whom I personally knew or have at least been acquainted with, I found that I prioritised these far more from this point. I did also read from two bilingual volumes, one in French and one in Spanish, where I would read in those languages and then the English translation or vice versa, and from two volumes of Gazan poetry. Weaving even the most despairing of these poems into the communality of the space and the wool, the images and the other sounds, felt like we were all giving them sanctuary.

Canal Space. Image Credit: Ann Hamilton Studios.

When I wasn’t reading the poetry books I had fetched, I was reading from curated works left for me in the booth and, perhaps most joyful of all, from the large binders containing letters visitors had written to The Future. Some of these were sweet, some sad, some funny, some reflective, some fearful, some even hopeful, but all moved me in some way. I often had to stop and compose myself before reading on.

The spinning room, although the largest space, was also the sparsest and brightest, its skylights allowing in floods of sunlight, criss-crossed by the beading of the windows, and by the shadows cast onto the flagstones by the rafters under the pitched roof. At one end were huge blue drapes, tethered to the floor by stone weights. The criss-crossed sunshine formed a path of light the length of the room, which also felt in itself like another weaving. The space was far more echoey here, and with the haunting of the horns and the intermittent compressed silences, I could feel in some orbital, oblique way the clatter and racket of the machines and the shouts of the workers, and imagine them all in the room with me. It was this counter-intuitive and spooky feeling that led me to ask Ann whether she believed in ghosts. History is perhaps always a haunting, but harnessed by great art, here it is turned into a haunting that must be experienced and not passively observed. One which requires a community to be dipped in it again, like wool in lanolin (the faint scent of which also enriched these spaces). We all carry it because we all went through it, channelled by one woman’s vision, a woman who wove Memory and Love together in a sacred space and by some alchemy turned it into Possibility, or, The Future. Ann Hamilton – she’s quite something, huh?

Spinning Room. Image Credit: Ann Hamilton Studios.

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‘We Will Sing’ showcased at Salts Mill in Saltaire, Bradford from 19 May 2025 to 2 November 2025 as part of this years City of Culture. To keep up to date with Hamilton’s recent work you can follow her website.

For Keith’s in-depth interview with Ann, where they talk about fate, sound, community, memory, and the evolving legacy of her installation, read here.