Dig Where You Stand is an archival justice movement made up of artists, archivists, educators and local community members.
Read more about DWYS and its originsWelcome to the Archive
Explore past and present stories, events, exhibitions, artists, and more involved with DWYSBiennial 2024
There has not been anything like this done in South Yorkshire before, not at this scale. The Biennial is more than an arts exhibition, it is a reclamation. An act of memory recovery and a rennarration of the region’s racial history. Dig Where You Stand is an archival justice movement that has partnered with Sheffield City Archives, The Centre for Equity & Inclusion and Peter & Paul to bring you this powerful and necessary intervention.
Persistence Works
We are delighted that Persistence Works is one of the five major venues for the Dig Where You Stand 2024 exhibition. This is a purpose built, award winning studio complex that comprises 53 studios, around 80 artists & makers, across 6 floors.
Open Studio
For one day only - visit the Dig Where You Stand open studio and watch how three of our artists made their work through shadowpuppets, textiles and poetry.
Creative Workshop with Sile Sibanda
Uncover the hidden history of South Yorkshire and tell these previously untold stories through your own poetry and creative writing with Sile Sibanda. For ages 12 - 17.
DWYS Presents "We Gather" with Sheffield City Archives
Join us for a fascinating discussion about the hidden history of South Yorkshire and how the visual arts can bring it to life. Featuring commissioned artists Kedisha Coakley, Seiko Kinoshita and Patricia Bugembe with Senior Archivist Cheryl Bailey.
Ancestral Futures - Street Procession & Performance by Eelyn Lee & Collaborators
Join us for live procession through Sheffield City Centre to honour the first recorded Chinese people in Sheffield and numerous other ancestors from East and South-East Asian communities who passed through or settled in South Yorkshire.
Wentworth Woodhouse exhibition launch
Join us for the launch of Dig Where You Stand’s new exhibition with Wentworth Woodhouse. Here we make visible the unknown Black Georgian community of Rotherham and reveal some of the earliest recorded African-descended people in South Yorkshire.
DWYS Press Coverage
Press coverage for Dig Where You Stand, featuring The Guardian, The National Lottery Heritage Fund, The Tribune, Exposed Magazine & Now Then
Fractured: Black life through the cracks of Wentworth Woodhouse
An exhibition that makes visible the unknown Black Georgian community of Rotherham and reveals some of the earliest recorded African-descended people in South Yorkshire.
DWYS Presents "We Gather" with Sheffield Cathedral
Join us for a special evening of live performances to celebrate Dig Where You Stand's new and groundbreaking summer exhibition. Featuring DWYS Creative Director, Désirée Reynolds, and commissioned artists Otis Mensah, CJ Simon and Rosa Cisneros.
thresholds between different worlds
Doors represent not just entryways and new beginnings, they are also barriers, boundaries in wood, and thresholds between different worlds and different states of being. A physical crossroads. Transition. A choice made out of a desire to move or change your environment. They are portals to what was and who was, a kind of promise. The doors that can open will close and the doors that close will be used for art.
Moor Market
Back where it all started. The site of our first exhibition in 2021, Moor Market is a bustling hub of activity with over 90 independent businesses including many international stalls. It is a major part of the city's life flow, with people passing through to buy their fruit n veg, get their hair done, and enjoy food from around the world.
Sheffield Central Library
Sheffield Central Library is a much loved public space in the city centre. It is the single largest general lending and reference collection in the city's library service, and puts on a range of children and family activities throughout the year. It is also home to the Graves Art Galley, which displays a dazzling array of historic and contemporary visual art.
Winter Garden
Sheffield's impressive multi award-winning Winter Garden is one of the largest temperate glasshouses to be built in the UK during the last hundred years and is the largest urban glasshouse anywhere in Europe, home to more than 2500 plants from all around the world. It is a much loved space in Sheffield, often in perpetual motion as friends and families pass through to visit the various retail units and exhibition spaces inside and nearby.
Sheffield Cathedral
It brings us great pleasure that Sheffield Cathedral will be one of five venues to host the DWYS exhibition. Several of our commissioned artworks will be on show in the Cathedral's Shrewsbury Chapel. Through a dynamic combination of physical display and audio installation, we bring together pieces that spark critical conversations on the connection between faith, power and memorialisation.
Sheffield’s Africa
‘Sheffield’s Africa’ responds to the attitude of 20th Century Britain towards the African diaspora. Photography.
Whispers Of History
One of the first Somali women in Sheffield arrives in 1956. A fictional audio recording captures her working life.
Ancestral Futures
A Chinese baby is born and dies in Sheffield in 1855. At just 5 weeks old he’s buried at St Paul’s, now the site of the Peace Gardens. A processional street performance honours him and other ancestors from South and South-East Asian communities.
Nigeria Says No
'Nigeria Says No' is inspired by a 1909 article lamenting the fact that colonial Britain couldn't get Ibadan in Nigeria to drink enough article, unlike it states it can in Barnsley. Photography.
Hunter 77
Joe Philips is a steel worker in Sheffield who, in 1971, builds a boat that he hopes will take him back to Jamaica. Shadow puppets and film.
A Train Running over the Sea
A train commissioned by the Japanese Government was built by Yorkshire Engine Co., Meadow Hall Works in 1871. Multimedia artist Seiko Kinoshita has created and installed six banners to capture this unlikely connection between Japan and Sheffield.
Tears In A Cup
Lucretia Smith and Mathilde Boswell were buried at St Mary’s Churchyard in Beighton, 1844. A screendance and poem memorialises their lives.
Edgar Jessop Smith - Dreaming
Edgar Jessop Smith, the troubled son of a famous African American tragedian, struggles to settle in Sheffield. A visual poem explores this psychodrama.
When Our Souls Have Lean’d the Heat to Bear
Inspired by the known and unknown Black servants of Wentworth Woodhouse, Rotherham, during the Georgian era. Print plate materials: braided synthetic hair, pineapple leaves, hessian string, cardboard.
The Shadow that Life Becomes
An old Jamaican man contemplates his life in Britain. A short story read by its author.
The Sense of Us
A Sikh woman, who lived down Sheldon Road, Sheffield, is discovered and obscured in the 1939 census. A poem and audio recording captures her haunting.
Lost Voices Hidden Names
The journey from Nigeria to Sheffield and all the colours in between. A tapestry of silk dupion, organza, silk threads and soluble fabric.
The African Instruction
In 1820 a Sheffield born quaker purchases the freedom of two African men, Sandanee and Mahmadee. An epic narrative poem reimagines their story.
Romulus & Remus
Two French horn playing footmen, Romulus and Remus, were ‘gifted’ when they were around 16 to Lady Rockingham (who had a stately home in Rotherham) in 1776. This is a mixed media charcoal portrait adorned with a collage of lokta textures. 45cm x 55cm.
Eileen Biney
‘Exposure’ is a reimagining of Eileen Binney, sister to boxing legend Albert Binney, living in Sheffield from the 1920s onwards. Photography.
Point of Continuum
A Sikh woman, who lived down Sheldon Road, Sheffield, is discovered and obscured in the 1939 census. A poem captures her haunting.
We Gather - Migration Matters Festival 2024
Get a first insight into Dig Where You Stand's exciting new work before the launch of our summer exhibition, via Britain's largest festival about migration, sanctuary and refugees.
Travelling Ayahs Workshop
For International Women's Day we celebrated the extraordinary lives of travelling Ayahs in Britain
Travelling Ayahs in Britain: ordinary women in extraordinary circumstances
Dig Where You Stand invites you to a special event for International Women's Day.
Resource Pack
We will soon be sharing a new DWYS resource pack. This will be free to download for community groups, schools and colleges to use when “digging” into the local history of their own communities. The resources here share stories found in Sheffield Archives but we want you, with the help of this pack, to go to your own archives. Digging starts with you.
Patricia Bugembe
Patty B is a self taught artist, Ugandan by heritage, born and raised in Ethiopia and now based in Sheffield, UK. Moving around a lot throughout her lifetime Patty B has found a sense of home by creating art that explores her roots. With a signature mixed media style she creates images that journey further into the history, the beauty and the power of the Black culture, discovering identities and making sense of her experiences. Since her debut exhibition "Her Story Remained Unfinished" at the Abbeydale Picture House, Sheffield, Patty B has continued to display her artwork in exhibitions around the country, on billboard campaigns and has had a special features in NowThen's Magazine.
Seiko Kinoshita
Seiko is a Japanese artist who lives and works in Sheffield. Based in her studio at Persistence Works, Yorkshire Artspace, she creates large installations, sculptures, and films often using traditional textile and craft techniques. She also loves working on Public Realm projects that are socially engaged and focus on the hidden stories of local people and their heritage. In her practice, she is interested in how slow and dying craft techniques have a future and keep its cultural value within our ever-changing fast-paced society, and how those old traditional techniques can exist within the contemporary art arena. In recent years, she enjoys collaborating with other professionals such as scientists and sound engineers on challenging projects in new creative directions.
Eelyn Lee
Eelyn Lee is an award winning artist and filmmaker of Hong Kong-English heritage who has shown work at Barbican, Tate Modern, Whitechapel Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, Palais de Tokyo and at international film festivals. Her art practice combines collective research, performance and filmmaking to create frameworks for collaboration. With ‘organising’ a key aspect of her practice, Eelyn has convened a range of community building projects including the Social Art Summit [2018] - an artist-led review of socially engaged arts practice, and the ESEA Artists’ Futures Town Hall [2023] - a place to imagine new landscapes for East and Southeast Asian artists in the UK and beyond. Her ongoing body of work, Performing Identities is a collective reimagining of ESEA identities through the creation of new mythical characters and their cosmologies.
Kedisha Coakley
Kedisha Coakley is a London-born, Sheffield-based artist. Her practice spans sculpture, photography, and printmaking, predominantly casting in bronze, through which she interrogates Black histories and experiences. Investigating the overlooked, she remixes aesthetics, techniques, and cultural refences throughout her work. Process, hybridity, and materiality are important strands of her practice. Coakley’s work begins as a personal investigation of self, childhood memories and ritualistic practices in the lives of Black communities, and what they signify universally in the world. Making visible suppressed or express meaning by looking hard at what exists in the world of cultural objects, exploring the unconscious of culture, maintaining the integrity of their origins.
Najma Heybe
Najma Heybe is a creative artist from Sheffield. Her passion for writing and poetry is driven by a deep desire to express herself and connect with others through her writing.
Jacqui Hilson
Jacqui Hilson is a self-taught textile artist and speaker who has developed a machine -based technique using Mola (Reverse Applique). Jacqui's art explores motifs taken from nature that are found in many cultures. Her work draws inspiration from her Nigerian background and her Yorkshire surroundings. A strong interest in colour and the part it plays in evoking and depicting emotions is a large part of her craft, as is the texture and layers of fabric. The technique of Reverse Applique involves taking sharp scissors to to cut through layers of fabric revealing what is underneath. The technique is not dissimilar to the one employed by historians to unearth the stories that have been covered by layers of time.