Research fellows 2024
Each year our fellowship programme enables artists and researchers to develop their work.
In 2024 our visiting fellows included Caroline Bergvall, Trey Burns, Juliane Foronda, Dominic Hardy, Sam Metz, Tinashe Mushakavanhu, Alberto Pirro and Teresa Porciani.
![Sam Metz](https://images.henry-moore.org/uploads/2024/06/Sam-Metz-landscape.jpg?resize=16%2C10&gravity)
![Caroline Bergvall](https://images.henry-moore.org/uploads/2024/06/Caroline-Bergvall.jpg?fit=50%2C40)
Caroline Bergvall
Poet and interdisciplinary artist
Research Fellowship
2024
Henry Moore Institute
The Book as Transitory Shelter
As a poet and interdisciplinary artist, Bergvall creates books, drawings, soundworks, performances and installations. A multilingual artist of French-Norwegian origins, she brings this mixed and at times difficult cultural background to bear on her work and on her experience of the home as a moveable, shifting and complex issue. Her projects engage with the criss-crossing of histories and politics of languages, writing’s many material and poetic cultures, and are often also framed by specific histories and the multi-dimensional imaginations of translocal and hybrid, diasporic and/or queer identities.
The overarching motif of her research is to ask how a book can and does function in relation to notions of transit, of temporary shelter, in a material, textual and artistic way, and also symbolically. How it can provide a safe yet critical space. How it can live and work in and also out of time, and create between artist and reader a space of material connection, critical complicity, discovery and urgency.
All this sits hand in hand with Bergvall’s deep interest in fugitive forms and materials, and mutating linguistic forms. The artist-poetic book, with its focus on a specific constructed material and performative space, occupies a place of its own that can be passed from hand to hand, from reader to reader. This is culturally and philosophically very precious, especially now, at a time when loss of refuge, shelter and protection, literally and culturally, are so virulent. This deeply affects the reality and role of the artistic space.
What kind of transitory thinking and active space can the material book enable in the reader/viewer? Our changing social literacies reinforce at one end of the spectrum the material and sculptural idea of the book as time-space object. It carves out its own space like a moveable zone, a protected area for inner travelling and interconnective imagination that can equip us to rethink or meet again the worlds that we are each a part of and contribute to.
Bergvall is very keen to use her time at the Henry Moore Institute to discover books and sketchbooks by artists and poets who favour such concerns and have an understanding of the expansive and reconnective space such books can provide. This will be her first artist and poetic book project since her award-winning mixed form Drift (2015).
Caroline Bergvall is a poet and interdisciplinary artist who works across languages, media, and artforms. Her work includes books, voice-led performances, installations, soundworks and drawings.
Bergvall’s work often explores the charged and moveable perceptual borders between languages, identities and histories. She shows and performs her work widely and is the recipient of many international commissions, research fellowships and awards, including the Bernard Heidsieck Art Prize Award (Centre Pompidou, Paris) and a Choldmondeley Award (Society of Authors, UK).
Notable books include the trilogy Meddle English (2011), Drift (2015) and Alisoun Sings (2019). Her Sonic Atlas cycle of various live and contextual works is ongoing and has been developed with an artistic team and various commissioning partners across Europe and the UK. She was a Writer-in-Residence at Whitechapel Gallery (2018), Collaborative Art Fellow at the University of Chicago (2017), and a Kelly Writer’s House Poetry Fellow (Philadelphia, 2022). Bervall is currently Global Professorial Fellow, Queen Mary University London.
![Trey Burns](https://images.henry-moore.org/uploads/2024/06/trey-burns-headshot.png?fit=50%2C40)
Trey Burns
Artist, writer, and educator, University of North Texas
Research Fellowship
2024
Henry Moore Institute
Floating Fire Machine
Trey Burns will explore Stephen Cripps’ sculptural and performative works, centring on his drawing Floating Fire Machine 1975 as a proposal for the River Thames. Intertwining biological, technological, social, and political ecologies, this project aims to contextualize Cripps’ artistic practice within a broader historical interconnectedness.
This research project will unpack the fundamental aspects of Cripps’ practice, particularly his use of military-industrial equipment and volatile chemicals, highlighting the context of the River Thames’ legacies of industrial pollution. The research will lead to the development of a video and artist-made publication that compiles Burns’ archival findings and integrates his own analyses.
Trey Burns is an artist, writer, and educator currently working in the New Media department at the University of North Texas. Since 2018, he has been co-director of Sweet Pass Sculpture Park, a non-profit arts organisation that provides space and support for experimental and large-scale outdoor works by emerging voices. In 2023, Sweet Pass received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for the alternative education and exhibition program Sculpture School, which invites artists to look more deeply at place.
Burns has shown his work both domestically and internationally, including Pavillion Vendôme (Clichy-la-Garenne, France), Nasher Sculpture Center (Dallas, TX), Saint Louis Art Museum (St Louis, MO), Ecole Nationale d’Architecture Paris, Malaquais Gallery (Paris, France), Wassaic Projects (Wassaic, NY), Tarleton State University (Stephenville, TX), Wells College (Aurora, NY), and et al Projects (Brooklyn, NY). His writing has recently been published in Southwest Contemporary, the Holt/Smithson Foundation, Nasher Magazine, and Burnaway.
![Juliane Foronda](https://images.henry-moore.org/uploads/2024/06/Juliane-Foronda.jpg?fit=50%2C40)
Juliane Foronda
Artist, writer, and researcher
Research Fellowship
2024
Henry Moore Institute
Linguistic gestures as artifacts of labour and community in the artistic process
Using the Henry Moore Institute’s extensive archive as a catalyst into considerations of value and worth, Foronda’s research will particularly focus on the (hidden) labour involved in maintaining an artistic practice, and the interconnectedness necessary to exist in community. Her research will concentrate on text-based ephemera – from handwritten notes, various correspondences between artists, and article clippings, offering a glimpse into the peripheries of ‘final’ or ‘finished’ artworks, the labour involved in nurturing an arts practice, and the community that comes with it.
Juliane Foronda (she/her) is a Filipina-Canadian artist, writer, and researcher. Predominantly through object, intervention and text, her practice is invested in radical care, feminist hospitality, and traditions of gathering. A significant aspect of her work involves archival and collections research. Her investment in this unfolds with her affinity for learning about what people choose to keep close and why, as well as how communities are built, maintained, and preserved. She earned her MA in Fine Arts from Listaháskóli Íslands/Iceland University of the Arts, and her BA in Studio Art from the University of Guelph.
![Dominic Hardy](https://images.henry-moore.org/uploads/2024/06/Dominic-Hardy-portrait-square.png?fit=50%2C40)
Dominic Hardy
University of Quebec at Montreal
Research Fellowship
2024
Henry Moore Institute
Thinking with Helen Chadwick, Artist and Reader
For this fellowship Hardy will read the annotations made by Helen Chadwick in books that she acquired throughout her career and that sit alongside the artist’s archives at the Henry Moore Institute. The breadth of these annotations is indicated in the catalogue of her library: books on philosophy, art history, narrative genres and on the relationships between life sciences and the arts.
Ideas of home, body, gender, biology, physics, are but a few of the components in Chadwick’s studies in phenomenological and cognitive relationships. Reading the annotations is a form of close listening to the artist as she rehearses and processes the conceptual frameworks for her making of sculptural works.
This project, itself a first step towards better understanding Chadwick’s choice of materials, scale and siting in in the fulfilment of her creative endeavours, is also the basis of research in the works of British and Canadian women artists in the period 1960-2000.
Dominic Hardy joined UQAM’s Department of Art History in December 2008 as professor, history and historiography of art in Québec / Canada. With degrees in Art History (Ph.D., Concordia), Canadian Interdisciplinary Studies (MA, Trent University) and Visual Arts (BFA, Concordia), he has published extensively on satire in visual culture.
He is the co-editor of Quand la caricature sort du journal: Baptiste Ladébauche 1878-1962 (Fides 2015, with Micheline Cambron), Sketches from an Unquiet Country: Canadian Graphic Satire 1840-1940 (MQUP 2018, with Annie Gérin and Lora Senechal Carney) and L’image railleuse. La satire visuelle du 18e siècle à nos jours (INHA/OpenEdition 2019, with Laurent Baridon and Frédérique Desbuissons).
Hardy’s current focus is the development of protocols for placing art history at the service of the diasporic and migrant communities of Montreal. He is director of LAB-A Laboratoire numérique des études sur l’histoire de l’art au Québec and co-editor, with Édith-Anne Pageot, of the online journal Le Carnet. Histoires de l’art.
![Sam Metz](https://images.henry-moore.org/uploads/2024/06/Sam-Metz.jpg?fit=50%2C40)
Sam Metz
Artist
Research Fellowship
2024
Henry Moore Institute
Exploring the tactile choreographic in Paul Neagu’s archive
Sam Metz is revisiting the work of Paul Neagu considering an ecocritical feminist embodied practice approach, valuing the multisensory and the somatic and material- affective methods of attuning the body through sculptural form. Their research will explore the notion of ‘choreographic objects’ (explored by contemporary artists such as William Forsythe) and be underpinned by philosophical interpretation of theorists such as Erin Manning. ‘Choreographic objects’ as an approach is underscored by both somatics and research in ecological perception, which has been used to frame both how dancers make embodied spatiotemporal relationships to site through sculptural objects and how the objects themselves implicate the body. This framing seems to intuitively match the raison d’être of tactile objects created by Neagu and the strong move away from occulacentrism in his work which valued multisensory approaches to interpretation. The ecocritical re-reading of Neagu’s work therefore seeks to challenge the sensory modality hierarchies that Neagu himself was wrestling with, whilst also complimenting Metz’s own practice as a visually impaired, disabled and neurodivergent sculptor working with visual hapticity.
Metz’s research will be primarily written in form, but will also inform the creation of their own notation objects, e.g. small scale drawings and sculptural forms in their studio space at The Arthouse, Wakefield. Architect and philosopher Juhani Palllasmaa helps consider this experiential approach to research and the extended possibilities of this kind of tacit learning through drawing in the expanded field, suggesting that “learning a skill is not primarily founded on verbal teaching but rather on the transference of the skills from the muscles of the teacher directly to the muscles of the apprentice through the act of sensory perception and bodily mimesis (Pallasmaa, 2009, p. 15)”. In this sense, Metz is mirroring some of the tools that Neagu used whilst also acknowledging that at times, diagrammatic practice allows them to describe that more helpfully and more readily than the written word does. Sam will therefore conduct their research through both practice as research and written form and engagement with the archive of Paul Neagu.
Sam Metz is an artist who explores the concept of ‘neuroqueering’. This term refers to the act of challenging societal norms that are hostile towards non-normative neurodivergent individuals. Their practice investigates and responds to the premise of subverting dominant structures that remain confrontational to neurodivergent bodies and minds.
Metz became a member of the Yorkshire Sculpture Network in 2022. Between 2021-24 they undertook supported research by Necessity to explore their project Drawing as Stimming, which seeks to explore how drawing and mark-making can support non-verbal interpretation of artworks, whilst also enabling safe spaces to stim. Recent exhibitions include: Drawing Attention: Emerging Artists in Dialogue, a British Museum Touring Exhibition, York Art Gallery, 2023; Found Cities, Lost Objects curated by Lubaina Himid and Beth Hughes, Leeds Art Gallery, 2023/24. Metz has also been part of the Emerging Curator British Art Network. They were awarded a CIRCA Scholarship MA Art and Ecology, Goldsmiths University (2022/23) and an Arts Council DYCP for sculptural research in 2024.
![Tinashe Mushakavanhu](https://images.henry-moore.org/uploads/2023/05/Tinashe-Mushakavanhu.jpg?fit=50%2C40)
Tinashe Mushakavanhu
Junior Research Fellow in African and Comparative Literature, St Anne’s College, University of Oxford
Research Fellowship
2024
Henry Moore Institute
The Stone Philosophers
The Stone Philosophers is a book that contests how the ‘archive’ on Zimbabwean art history has been constructed and curated. How do we honour our artists, dead and living? How do we remember them, and their stories? How do we celebrate our artists?
The network of artists who made stone sculpture famous grew organically, from village to village, through informal collaborations, which were eventually co-opted into the white art world of Rhodesia through the National Gallery, and subsequently exported to Europe and North America. This book is an ensemble of their stories and artistry. It will be a unique catalogue with a descriptive timeline situating the movement vis-à-vis relevant artworks and films, exhibitions, cultural criticism, and political events.
The book is an attempt to document a dynamic living archive of conversations, texts, and images. This is a character-driven book, which tells the story of a network of dynamic sculptors who were instrumental in the stone sculpture movement in Zimbabwe. The book tells the life stories of these artists alongside their developing ideas all within a changing social and political context. For decades, their views have been overlooked and their contributions told in stock stereotypes.
Tinashe Mushakavanhu obtained a first class BA degree in English from Midlands State University (Zimbabwe) before embarking on an MA in Creative Writing at Trinity College, Carmarthen (Wales) and later on received a PhD in English from University of Kent (England). He has held fellowships at University of Edinburgh (Scotland); Rhodes University and University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa) as well as City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism (USA).
The central theme of Mushakavanhu’s research is the role of literary culture in documentation, historical knowledge, and political power. He has particular interests in the aesthetics and materiality of writing; archives, and archival theory; translation; African and diaspora literatures, digital humanities, romanticism, creative writing, media studies, and comparative literatures. The work manifests in interdisciplinary modalities. It blurs creative and critical methods, and writing genres, in order to imaginatively reconfigure the strictures that conventionally separate the poetic and the theoretical.
![Alberto Pirro](https://images.henry-moore.org/uploads/2024/06/Alberto-Pirro.jpg?fit=50%2C40)
Alberto Pirro
PhD candidate, Università di Napoli Federico II
Research Fellowship
2024
Henry Moore Institute
On the Trail of a European Sculptor: New Perspectives on Baron Carlo Marochetti’s Career in the United Kingdom (1848-1867)
Alberto Pirro’s project explores the British career of the sculptor Carlo Marochetti, who produced nearly seventy public monuments across the Kingdom of Sardinia, France, and the United Kingdom. After a brilliant start in Turin and Paris, where he created several significant monuments, the sculptor moved to London in 1848. He joined a milieu dominated by influential figures in the history of British art, many of whom were still fascinated by the sculptural innovations brought to England by Canova and Thorvaldsen.
Despite his outstanding professional itinerary, Marochetti was often perceived as a stateless artist or a permanent émigré, if not a potential threat, lacking distinctive artistic models and unworthy of his prestigious clients’ trust. This research investigates the artistic environment the sculptor encountered in London upon his arrival, examining the reasons behind his success and the hostility he faced, possibly due to fears of foreign influence on national art.
Pirro’s research will benefit from the Henry Moore Institute’s resources to better explore Marochetti’s interactions with contemporary sculptors and his impact on the artistic community. His main goal is to reevaluate Marochetti as a pivotal figure in 19th-century European art by analysing his extensive work and its controversies
Alberto Pirro (Naples, 1990) is a PhD candidate in Historical, Archaeological and Historical-Artistic Sciences (XXXVII cycle) at the Università di Napoli Federico II. Supervised by Professors Isabella Valente and Claudio Pizzorusso, he is currently working on the monumental production of Carlo Marochetti (1805-67), a sculptor active in the courts of the Kingdom of Sardinia, France, and the United Kingdom. He graduated from the Università di Roma Tre (2017) and the Università di Torino (2020). He also studied in France, attending the École Nationale des Chartes and doing an internship at the Département des Sculptures of the Musée du Louvre (2018-19). Following a year of study as a résident chercheur at the Bibliothèque et Villa Marmottan (2022-23) in Paris, he is now continuing his research on early 19th-century sculpture and, in particular, on those artists travelling and working between Italy, France and England.
![Teresa Porciani](https://images.henry-moore.org/uploads/2024/06/Teresa-Porciani.jpg?fit=50%2C40)
Teresa Porciani
Art historian
Research Fellowship
2024
Henry Moore Institute
Figural sculpture in early medieval West Yorkshire (AD 750-900): power, religion and memory
Until the end of the ninth century, the West Riding of Yorkshire was under the control of Northumbrian rulers, forming the southern boundary of their kingdom. However, not much is known of the religious and political history of this border territory in the eighth and ninth centuries, before Viking armies conquered York in 867. Textual evidence after c.750 is scarce for West Yorkshire, as it is for the rest of Northumbria. Conversely, stone sculpture is rich, including over 400 items in Northumbria (pre-900), with more than 60 contemporary pieces in West Yorkshire alone.
Teresa Porciani’s project aims to re-assess what we know of the history of West Yorkshire between c. 750-900, as gleaned from the style, content and carving techniques of early medieval figural sculptures now preserved in Leeds and within a twenty-mile range from it. This project will also investigate the current displays of this medium inside churches/museums in West Yorkshire, raising questions about the accessibility and knowledge of this under-studied sculptural material.
Teresa Porciani is an art historian specialising in the art of the Early Middle Ages (c. 500-1000). She gained her BA and MA in History of Art from the University of Pisa, and in 2023 completed a PhD at the University of Leicester, with a thesis on figural stone sculpture produced in pre-Viking England (c. pre-850).
![Henry Moore working on 'Stone Memorial' (LH 491b)](https://images.henry-moore.org/uploads/2024/08/HM-with-stone-memorial-LH-491b.jpg?fit=50%2C40)
Javier Ruiz del Río
Postdoctoral Research and Teaching Associate, University of Cambridge
Research Fellowship
2024
Henry Moore Studios & Gardens
The outsourcing of sculpture: Henry Moore’s generation in the Apuan Alps
The Apuan district has been at the centre of international marble economies since the Roman quarries re-opened in the late Middle Ages. Known for its ‘Carrara’ marble, this Italian region has also been home to a large community of artisans, a sector that entered its Golden Age during the long nineteenth century. After the Second World War, however, Neoclassical markets dried out, and local firms turned to a new generation of sculptors that included Henry Moore. Like him, many others established long-lasting collaborations with Apuan producers.
Javier Ruiz del Río’s project aims to identify primary data to reconstruct this period, which he has previously approached from the perspective of oral history. Through the study of personal correspondence, contracts with Apuan firms, and Moore’s photographic collections, this project will create new bodies of historical evidence to open lines of investigation into Apuan artmaking after the institutionalization of the avant-garde.
Javier Ruiz del Río is a social anthropologist specialising in contemporary art and industrial labour. He holds a BA in Fine Arts (Complutense University, Madrid) and an MRes in Anthropology from the University of Saint Andrews. He completed his PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge in 2023, where he is currently based as a Postdoctoral Research and Teaching Associate.
![Ljubica Vujović Portrait photo of Ljubica Vujović.](https://images.henry-moore.org/uploads/2024/08/Ljubica-Vujovic.jpg?fit=50%2C40)
Ljubica Vujović
PhD candidate, research and teaching assistant, University of Belgrade
Research Fellowship
2024
Henry Moore Studios & Gardens
Henry Moore in Yugoslavia (1955)
Ljubica Vujović’s project explores Henry Moore’s exhibition in Yugoslavia in 1955, specifically showcasing his works in Belgrade. Besides the undeniable importance of his art, the exhibition itself bears witness to the change in the socio-political atmosphere of the former Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia. It is one in a series of exhibitions of Western European art organised in Belgrade in the 1950s, the significance of which, as testimony to the change in social, and consequently, cultural atmosphere, has not diminished even today.
This research seeks to answer the question of whether an art exhibition, specifically one from internationally recognised artist, such as Henry Moore, can play an active role in redefining the cultural climate, and/or influence the local artistic scene or its international reputation. Research objective develops from the assumption that artistic practice and artistic manifestations, such as exhibitions, can be understood as a form of political action, besides their obvious cultural importance. Moore’s arrival in Belgrade and his exhibition held immense historical and cultural significance. The visit of such a prominent international artistic figure to Yugoslavia was a rare occurrence, unprecedented before Moore’s arrival. In this regard, it marked a notable milestone.
By thoroughly examining the materials available in the Henry Moore Archive, the British Council Archive, and relevant archives in Belgrade, this analysis aims to present a comprehensive perspective on the subject.
Ljubica Vujović (Belgrade, 1998) is a PhD candidate, research and teaching assistant at the Art History Department, University of Belgrade. Additionally, in the role of a teaching assistant, she conducted a course on the History of Modern Art, as well as National History of Modern Art, at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Arts in Belgrade (2023-24). She completed her master’s studies with a thesis on the topic of Henry Moore’s exhibition in Belgrade from a socio-cultural and political standpoint. The focus of her research is related to 20th-century art and visual cultural, specifically the realm of cultural policy, the intersection of modern art and the spectrum of cultural, social, and political factors, exhibition history, and the history of modern sculpture.