Research fellows 2024

Caroline Bergvall

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.

Juliane Foronda

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.

Sam Metz

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.

Alberto Pirro

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.

Javier Ruiz del Río

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.