Sheffield Cathedral is participating in a ground-breaking arts exhibition which sheds light on the hidden histories of South Yorkshire’s minority communities. Commissioned and curated by ‘Dig Where You Stand’, the cathedral is one of five Sheffield venues to be displaying artworks from Saturday 20 July to Sunday 18 August 2024.
‘Dig Where You Stand’ is part of a project being supported by The National Lottery Heritage Fund. It is a collaborative exhibition by 14 artists of colour, all based in South Yorkshire, who have explored local archives and produced dynamic new work to reveal the unknown history of people of colour in the region.
Just as histories are written across a city, this multi venue exhibition will display artworks across a range of highly visible public spaces, including Sheffield Cathedral. Make your way around Sheffield city centre and be moved by a stirring mixture of painting, poetry, puppetry, soundscapes, film, textiles, and live performance. Profiles of all the artists can be found on the ‘Dig Where You Stand’ website (www.dwys.co.uk) together with information about exhibition venues, accompanying events and workshops.
This free exhibition grants access to stories that have been hidden deep within the archive and breathes life into people often reduced to bare facts, figures or silence. In doing so it helps renarrate the North, dispelling the myth of a pure white past glorified in mainstream historical accounts, while demonstrating how deeply rooted people of colour are in the region’s foundations.
‘Dig Where You Stand’ was originally developed by writer and activist Désirée Reynolds during her residency at Sheffield City Archives in 2021. Using art to navigate the fragments and gaps contained within the archives, Reynolds recovered and reimagined the stories of several local working-class Black and Brown people. These were showcased in a series of sold out exhibitions and documented through articles published by Now Then Magazine. Désirée is Creative Director for the exhibition:
“Dig Where You Stand isn’t about kings and queens but ordinary people who end up in the archive as fragments of a will, notice in a newspaper, play bills or a baptismal record. Black and Brown people and other racialised communities have been here for centuries and we want to bring that out.” (Désirée Reynolds, Creative Director of Dig Where You Stand).
Rev Dr Casey Strine, the Bishop of Sheffield’s Advisor for Inter-Faith Affairs commented “Sheffield Cathedral is very pleased to be hosting the Dig Where You Stand Biennial. To show these brilliant insights into Sheffield’s often forgotten past alongside the prominent histories preserved in our Cathedral offers a wonderful opportunity to reconnect with people and events that have made this city great. I hope this will be the first of many occasions on which we use this historic space in the heart of Sheffield to tell the stories of people of colour that have too frequently been overlooked.”