Bradford Cathedral is hosting the Woven Lives exhibition from the 8th July to the 1st September 2025, as part of the ‘Weaving Stories’ season of events during the UK City of Culture year – and we can take a first look at how it’s coming together!
Woven Lives is a beautiful and powerful artwork which talks of the lives and stories of the people of Bradford. The woven coloured glass and symbols, lit from within, show how light and dark times are all part of the story of community and connection.
In early February we visited the second of the workshops held at Shine West Bowling, where Linda Baines and Shaeron Caton-Rose are working with people from across Bradford on capturing stories from their lives and getting them to immortalise them in illustrations that will form part of the Woven Lives artwork.
The process started a week earlier where those taking part – some meeting on Thursdays, another on Fridays – were asked to create a physical timeline on rolls of paper of key events in their life. their life story using only stones and flowers placed along a rope.
On the second week they were asked to turn these milestones into visual images, that may be a literal illustration of that event or something that is more metaphorical. For instance a previous participant had illustrated a thriving career as a rocket blasting off, and a more difficult life event as an explosion.
In this workshop the group were encouraged to talk about their lives, as they created the pictograms in pencil, which they then overlaid in Indian Ink to give them thicker, blacker lines.
Following the workshop, these images were scanned into a computer and printed onto two sheets of acetate, to give them a deeper black outline, before being transferred onto photo sensitive paper. In the next workshop the participants will use paint to transfer the images through the permeable paper onto glass, which will then be fired in a kiln.
The Woven Lives artwork will consist of grids of glass – some with the images, some blank – hung together to form the overall piece, and from the look of the work done so far, it will be amazing to see.
Alongside the workshop, videographer Luke Hogan is capturing the stories of those taking part, which will form an accompanying video on display with the art, because the project is as much about the stories behind the artwork as it is the piece itself.
