Dean Clough business and arts complex in Halifax is looking to complete a 20-year art exhibit that consists of personal items which once belonged to people who used to work in what used to be the world’s biggest carpet mill – Crossley’s Carpets.

In 1994, the artist Christian Boltanski exhibited his work at Dean Clough’s Henry Moore Studio and left behind a permanent exhibition called The Lost Workers.

Located in a basement room under E Mill, the exhibition comprises more than 100 cardboard boxes each of which bears the name of somebody who used to work there and a personal item such as a photograph, a newspaper clipping or a spectacle case.

Boltanski once said: “We are all so complicated, and then we die. We are a subject one day, with our vanities, our loves, our worries, and then one day, abruptly, we become nothing... we become an object you can handle like a stone, but a stone that was someone.”

As part of the forthcoming Halifax Festival, exhibition curator Cath Graham is keen to find more people who would like to add to the collection.

The idea is to show how a mundane object has the power to provoke questions about the way we are remembered after we die – and about the meaning of what we do while we are alive.

On two days next month, July 6 and 14, public viewings of The Lost Workers exhibit are available from 10am to 3pm.

If you used to work at the former carpet factory and would like to contribute to The Lost Workers, contact Cath on (01422) 250250 or cafflg@yahoo.co.uk.