Focusing on the issues of slavery and colonialism, sex and gender, freedom of information, protest and censorship, Beyond Words presents the idea of freedom as part of a process of public dialogue, ongoing struggle, a rejection of the proprietary understanding of art and language, and a celebration of the challenges that artists can make to the status quo.

For this element of Beyond Words, Book Works has commissioned three projects that extend and develop the interest and issues of freedom, from archive re-search, through family history, personal memories, and political conjuncture. Two artists, Helen Cammock and Hannah Dawn Henderson, have been commissioned for projects developed out of residencies at the Hull History Centre and the Wilberforce Institute for the study of Slavery and Emancipation, University of Hull (WISE), alongside a new artist’s book commission with Lubaina Himid. For each of the artists the complex history of a port city such as Hull has provided the visual and social context to explore and research the relationships of community, trade, survival and exclusion, or to provide a backdrop for paintings, whose messages extend out into the world of design, textiles and political activism.