If These Hills Could Speak: Wild Uplands at Penistone Hill Country Park

“What stories filled your lungs today?” asks the voice in my headphones as I begin to climb Penistone Hill. The question belongs to Earth and Sky, a haunting and immersive soundwalk by Opera North that forms part of Wild Uplands, a new outdoor exhibition curated by Shanaz Gulzar, creative director of Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture. The exhibition invites four artists – Monira Al Qadiri, Meherunnisa Asad with Studio Lél, Vanessa da Silva and Steve Messam – to create site-specific works that engage with the layered landscape of this former quarry site near Haworth, where sheep paths cross industrial remains and the Brontë sisters once wandered.

Wild Uplands asks what it means to make art not just about a place, but in it – amid shifting weather, bird calls and the occasional carcass of a rabbit, half-hidden in the grass. The works do not dominate the landscape; instead, they seem to grow out of it. 

The first work I encounter is Vanessa da Silva’s Muamba Posy, its strange, metallic forms rising out of the hilltop clearing like alien blooms. At once prehistoric and futuristic, the sculptures echo both the site’s ancient past – 300 million years ago, this was a tropical forest – and the plants and creatures that now define it, such as heathers, bilberries and damselflies. The shapes suggest fossilised flora or seedpods caught mid-transformation, while their reflective surfaces hint at human presence – your body mirrored, briefly, in their curves. Da Silva, who often draws from dance and Brazilian art history, works with the body and movement, but here invites stillness. These forms echo the curving lines of dance, but visitors are encouraged to sit, to touch, to spend time with the work and, in doing so, with the land itself. “If the work sparks curiosity or helps someone feel more connected to the land around them, that feels meaningful to me,” da Silva tells Canvas.

Muamba Posy responds not only to what is visible on the moor, but also to what is hidden. “The past is present throughout the landscape,” da Silva says. “In the soil beneath your feet and the stones around you.” She was especially struck by the resilience of the metal-loving plants that grow here – species that have adapted to survive in soil altered by mining. “They are small and often overlooked, but they tell a powerful story about endurance, adaptation and the relationship between human impact and nature’s response… They are a living trace of the industrial past, but also a sign of regeneration.”

I must admit that at first I had wondered if it was quite a long way to come for just four artworks. But that question quickly gave way to a slower kind of attention, one rooted in listening, in walking, in the pleasure of stumbling across something unexpected. Like the pond that appears suddenly – and beside it, glimmering against the heathery browns of the hill, the soft pink shimmer of stone butterflies.

This is 99 Butterflies, a piece by Meherunnisa Asad in collaboration with Studio Lél and inspired by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s poignant meditation on displacement: Where will we go after the last frontiers? Where will the birds fly after the last sky? The butterflies are carved from pink marble sourced in Mardan, Asad’s maternal village in northern Pakistan, and crafted using pietra dura, a sixteenth-century inlay technique once favoured by the Mughal court. “The moors have this stillness to them – shaped by time, weather and labour,” Asad tells me. “That duality between raw nature and human industry really stayed with me. I knew I wanted to work with materials that also held those layers of history.” Each butterfly is embedded with memory – of place, of craft, of migration. Many of the artisans who created them are Afghans now living in Peshawar, displaced by war. Asad speaks movingly of the piece as a tribute to fragility and resilience, to hands and histories so often left out of contemporary public art. “Pietra dura has long been seen as a decorative art,” she says, “but I see it as something more – a way of holding memory… In this context, ornament becomes narrative, and the act of embellishment becomes a form of resistance.”

Placed at the pond’s edge, the butterflies seem poised – just landed, or about to lift off: an echo of what Asad calls Darwish’s way of “holding both pain and grace”. “That in-between moment – of flight, or return – was important to me,” he explains. “It echoes the feelings I carry and the stories I grew up with.” One is larger than the rest, a quiet but “deliberate disruption”. “It carries the weight of collective memory, held gently by the earth,” the artist tells me. The piece echoes not only the emotional landscape of displacement and longing, but also Bradford’s long, layered history of migration. “It became about collective memory,” Asad says, “about the possibility of new belonging. A kind of remembering that doesn’t just look back but also begins to root.”

A little further on, rising unexpectedly on the horizon, is Steve Messam’s Tower. From a distance, it looks like a stone structure – some remnant of the quarrying that once defined this hill. But up close, its cladding reveals itself to be wool. Derbyshire Gritstone and Lonk fleece, to be exact – two sheep breeds native to the region. Messam is interested in the ways in which landscapes are layered with stories: “This idea of a ‘natural’ landscape doesn’t really exist, particularly in the UK,” he says. “So I wanted to do something that was about the land itself and sat as part of that landscape for a while.” The fleece speaks not just to the sheep that still graze this moorland but also to Bradford’s history as the ‘Wool Capital of the World’. 

Messam is drawn to this relationship between rural and urban, the way that upland landscapes like Penistone Hill have shaped, and been shaped by, their human neighbours. “That the City of Culture programming was engaging rural communities was a really refreshing and confident move,” he tells me, pointing to the programme’s extension beyond the city of Bradford itself. The tower feels monumental but also oddly humble. Bits of wool fluff drift across the surrounding grass, hinting both at the artwork’s impermanence and staging a kind of return: wool is once again roaming the moors. “The great thing about work in the public domain,” says Messam, “is that people are free to think and react how they want without judgement… What’s also interesting for me is how they might feel after the exhibition is over and the artwork is gone – how that memory becomes another layer of narrative in the landscape.”

The final piece I encountered – and perhaps the most elusive for its positioning downhill amid a vast green expanse – is The Children of Smokeless Fire by Monira Al Qadiri. Nestled in the grass are cut-out figures inspired by the Cottingley Fairies – infamous photographs of hoax fairies, made in 1917 by two Bradford girls – and the ancient djinn of Islamic cosmology, said to be made of smokeless fire. The djinn figures are strange and playful and, viewed from afar, their spectral forms appear and disappear, set against the grass and blending just enough to make you question whether you saw them at all.

Al Qadiri’s work plays with belief and perception, with what we choose to see and what we dismiss. The Cottingley Fairies were once held up as evidence of the unseen world; the djinn appear in medieval manuscripts as beings that coexist with us, half-hidden. Here, on the moor, they feel both whimsical and eerie, haunting the place like stories half-remembered – an uncanny reminder that every landscape holds stories that we cannot always see.

Each work in Wild Uplands invites you to linger, to consider time and craft, and to listen – both to what is present and to what has passed. As I circle back towards the start, I am struck by the sense that none of these artworks aims to explain or conclude. Instead, they open up quiet spaces for reflection – on movement, on memory, on who we are and where we come from. As Asad puts it, “The butterflies began as a tribute… but on that land, the work stretched wider. It became about collective memory, about the possibility of new belonging. A kind of remembering that doesn’t just look back, but also begins to root.”

Wild Uplands runs until 12 October