Henry Moore Foundation 2025 programme

The 2025 season at Henry Moore Studios & Gardens will celebrate the inspiring and transformative encounters between Henry Moore and the people, objects and ideas in his orbit during his active career and beyond.

The programme will unfold across Moore’s home, studios and more than 70 acres of surrounding grounds, amplifying stories of the creative exchanges Moore had with his own collections, assistants and collaborators in the visual arts and architecture, music, literature, cinema, and theatre. A range of audio, visual and tactile experiences across the site – including a new presentation of sculptures in the grounds and a lively public programme – will share stories and anecdotes of such encounters, told in Moore’s own words and by commissioned contemporary artists and creatives, the curators at Henry Moore Studios & Gardens and those who were connected to or experienced Moore’s work.

A public programme of film screenings, performances, readings and talks with a wide range of interdisciplinary artists and visiting fellows will span the season, concluding with an international conference on Henry Moore in the autumn.

This site-wide season of learning about Moore through a multitude of voices and perspectives will provide visitors with new encounters with Moore in his home and places of making, and with his creative spirit that permeates the site. Encounters will highlight the unique history of Henry Moore Studios & Gardens as the starting point for the majority of Moore’s creative output that is found around the world, acknowledging Moore as a true interdisciplinary artist, mentor and playful instigator of creative experimentation.

The array of voices and perspectives from those who encountered and worked alongside Moore will inform the making of a major permanent exhibition that will open in the renewed Sheep Field Barn at Henry Moore Studios & Gardens in 2026.

Sarah Casey’s work responds to the precarious nature of glacial archaeology. The exhibition’s title is a term used to describe glacier health: a negative mass balance signals a receding glacier, where more ice melts than is accumulated.

Casey’s starting point is domestic artefacts emerging from alpine glaciers as the ice in which they have been preserved for 50, 500 or 5,000 years is now melting at unprecedented rates. This rare and valuable archaeology provides important knowledge about the past, but the cost of its emergence is environmental change and threatened futures. She engages with this timely contemporary issue by looking at how processes of drawing and sculpture might fuse their languages of marking and erasure, space and solid. Negotiating the space between ‘glacial’ presence and absence, Casey finds new ways of articulating loss and change, disrupting not only the division between drawing and sculpture, but between the human and geological. Casey asks: what is lost? For whom is it lost? What is revealed in its place?

The work in this display was initiated when Casey was a visiting research fellow at Henry Moore Institute in 2021-22. It was developed through her residency at Musée d’Art du Valais, Switzerland in 2023, in dialogue with Swiss archaeologists from the cantons of Valais and Bern.

Sarah Casey (b.1979) is Professor of Fine Art and its Histories at Lancaster University, UK. She studied History of Art with History and Philosophy of Science before retraining as an artist. As well as her fellowship at Henry Moore Institute she has been awarded residences in the UK and overseas, including Royal Drawing School Scottish Artist in Residence (2021), Ryerson Fashion Research Collection Toronto (2017) and Musee d’ Art du Valais (2023). In 2024 she won the John Muir Trust Creative Freedom Prize for 3D work and the William Littlejohn Award from Royal Scottish Academy.

This exhibition marks the culmination of a ground-breaking three-year collaborative research project led by Professor Ken Wilder (Professor of Aesthetics, University of the Arts London), Dr Aaron McPeake (artist and Associate Lecturer at Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London) and Dr Clare O’Dowd (Research Curator at Henry Moore Institute), together with Shape Arts, the UK’s leading disability-led arts organisation. The project is the recipient of the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s (AHRC) inaugural Exhibition Fund, a major grant supporting innovative, collaborative exhibition approaches.

For the first time in the Institute’s history, it will host an exhibition of contemporary sculpture designed to be experienced using multiple senses that move beyond the visual. The exhibition will include sculpture by international artists and celebrate the work of blind and non-blind artists who challenge the dominance of sight in the making and appreciation of art.

All of the work in the exhibition will be experienced through more than one sense, including through the often-forbidden act of touch. Beyond the Visual proposes that everyone gains from an enriched sensory experience, where accessibility is integral to the creative process. The exhibition will challenge the physical, cultural and societal conventions that usually shape art galleries and exhibitions.

The exhibition has been developed in close collaboration with blind and partially blind artists, curators and audiences. All the multi-sensory works will also be audio described, the descriptions generated by an inclusive process working with the artists.

Between October 2024 and April 2025, a research season will lead up to the exhibition, featuring a major conference, symposium, discussions and hands-on sculpture workshops. These events aim to address the under-representation of blind and partially blind arts practitioners, while also rethinking the relationship between artworks and audiences. The focus is on exploring what is gained from creative practices that emphasise a broader approach to sensory experience.

Beyond the Visual will be accompanied by a lively programme of public events and a multi-authored, open-access publication published by UCL Press.