Research fellows 2025
Each year our fellowship programme enables artists and researchers to develop their work.
In 2025, visiting fellows at the Henry Moore Institute included Manon Awst, Uma Breakdown, Ellie Brown, Megan Kincaid, Anna Martinez Rodriguez, Alexander Mourant, Émilie Roffidal, Damian Taylor, and Christopher Williams-Wynn.
Manon Awst
Artist
Research Fellowship
2025
Henry Moore Institute
Peat in Practice
Manon Awst is an artist based in Caernarfon, North Wales. Her sculptural and performative practice is rooted in peatlands. She will be exploring peat-orientated sculptural practice from Land Art through to the contemporary moment.
Awst intends to create a database of artists who have connected to peatland materiality and/or ecology from Joseph Beuys, Hans Haake, and Robert Smithson to contemporary artists like Eimear Walshe, Sekai Machache and Hannah Imlach.
During her fellowship she will also engage with areas of the Great North Bog, including the Nidderdale National Landscape and the North York Moors. This on-the-ground research will reinforce her practice through widening her knowledge of ‘peat-compatible’ materials for use in future site-specific sculptures.
Uma Breakdown
Artist and writer
Research Fellowship
2025
Henry Moore Institute
Trans Modal Myth
Dr Uma Breakdown will use the Henry Moore Institute’s Brian Catling Archive to explore processes of transformation in his work between poetry, sculpture, performance and fiction.
Breakdown is particularly interested in how the trans modality of Catling’s practice relates to myth systems; both as the myths created/transformed in his work, and exploring trans modality between object, action, and text, as myth making itself.
Within this strand, Breakdown will conduct further research into trans gender identity, particularly trans femininity as an ‘embodied mythmaking’ that is both individual and collective, and informed by space in a comparable manner to Catling’s performances. She will also experiment with art making that ‘treads lightly’ and how this connects to disability and class.
Ellie Brown
PhD candidate, University of Warwick
Research Fellowship
2025
Henry Moore Institute
The ‘golden age’ of shopping centres: Designing spaces of consumption in Britain 1965-1982
Ellie Brown’s research draws on art, architecture and design histories to examine the development of the British shopping centre in the late twentieth century. This reflects her broader interests in examining post-war commercial architecture through discussions of urban modernism and wider narratives of modernism in art, architecture and theory across the twentieth century.
Brown’s research draws on a plethora of visual material and objects – advertising, sculpture, interior design, photography, newspapers, illustration – to contextualise the construction of the shopping centre as both a space of consumption and anew way to consume the urban environment alongside social, political and economic shifts.
Megan Kincaid
Adjunct Assistant Professor at Cooper Union, New York
Lecturer in Art History & Theory, and Dance History, New York University
Research Fellowship
2025
Henry Moore Studios & Gardens
Henry Moore & Mexico: The Living Edge of Transcultural Exchange
Megan Kincaid’s project examines the interchange between Henry Moore and the formation of Mexican modernism in the mid-century.
As one of only two sculptors included in the Mexico City-based exile magazine, DYN (1942-44), Moore is also known to have revered pre-colonial Mesoamerican sculpture, and to have interacted with a wider network of contemporary Mexican artists during his travels and through sustained correspondence.
While existing scholarship has predominantly attended to the affinities between Moore’s formal arrangements and material sensibilities and pre-Columbian traditions, Kincaid’s interests lie in the larger resonance of Moore’s work among contemporary practitioners in Mexico and the impact of his presence, first via publications and later when he spent time in the country, to new directions in visual representation and spatial possibilities that emerged during the period.
Anna Martinez Rodriguez
Curator of Design at Turm zur Katz / Cultural Office Constance, Germany
Research Fellowship
2025
Henry Moore Studios & Gardens
Henry Moore in the eye of the Photographer: A Focus on Soichi Sunami’s Installation Views at MoMA 1946/47
Anna Martinez Rodriguez’s project investigates the representation of Moore’s work through photographers, with a specific focus on Soichi Sunami’s documentation of Moore’s 1946-47 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.
By analysing Sunami’s installation views and considering various resources, this study seeks to understand how photographic representation influenced the reception and interpretation of Moore’s sculptures.
Alexander Mourant
Artist, writer and Lecturer in Photography, Kingston School of Art
Research Fellowship
2025
Henry Moore Institute
Bruises and Wounds: The Art of Repair
Alexander Mourant will undertake primary research into collections materials relating to Garth Evans’ 1969-71 artist placement with the British Steel Corporation. He will research further evidence of artistic activity within, and in response to, industrial and agricultural contexts, and the impact this had on practice/theory.
In addition, he will prioritise the search for overlooked or hidden histories of queer practices within these contexts. He will deepen the theoretical framework on the speculative relationship between metal work, casting, sculpture and photography, for the essay ‘The Photographer’s Forge’, to be published in C4 Journal.
Émilie Roffidal
Senior Research Fellow, CNRS (Central National de la Recherche Scientifique) Toulouse
Research Fellowship
2025
Henry Moore Institute
Obelisks as celebration: the circulation, reception and adaptation of a transnational sculpted motif in Britain (1700-1830)
Dr Émilie Roffidal’s will conduct research into obelisks as transnational objects, forming part of a wider program she is leading on ‘Sculpture and its dynamics in the public space.’ She will use the Henry Moore Institute’s Sculpture research Library to search texts on obelisks, public sculpture and garden sculpture.
Roffidal will consult material relating to the Westmacott family of sculptors, stored in the Institute’s Archive of Sculptors’ Papers. She will also complete fieldwork, visiting UK obelisks including Ripon Obelisk, Umberslade Obelisk, Cumberland Obelisk, and Stoodely Pike Monument.
Damian Taylor
Artist and Senior Ruskin Tutor at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford
Research Fellowship
2025
Henry Moore Institute
The scanning-finger: Roger Ackling against the grain
Dr Damian Taylor’s research will reposition the work of Roger Ackling in relation to emerging communications technologies of the 1960s and 1970s, emphasising the significance of his early exposure to cybernetic theory in shaping his conception of art and the environment.
His main focus will be systematically consulting the papers of Ackling, held in the Institute’s Archive of Sculptors’ Papers. The primary outcome will be a scholarly article for publication in a peer-reviewed scholarly journal.
Image: Damian Taylor, Ecce Puer (after Rosso) 2023-24.
Christopher Williams-Wynn
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut, Florence
Research Fellowship
2025
Henry Moore Institute
Sculpting for Circulation
Dr Christopher Williams-Wynn will be looking at the reformulation of sculptural practice and spectatorship between the United Kingdon and Argentina c. 1971. He will be researching the transnational exchanges that underpinned the post-conceptual reformulation of sculpture in the United Kingdom during the first half of the 1970s.
He will focus on the David Dye archive, which contains rare catalogues, unpublished correspondence, exhibition plans, and preparatory sketches. He will examine broader connections between artists based in the UK and the Centre for Art and Communication (CAyC) in Buenos Aires.
This research forms part of his current book project, which examines why and how artists from London and Edinburgh to Buenos Aires, put systems thinking to work in the late 1960s and 1970s.