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Henry Moore Foundation 2025 programme

Today, the Henry Moore Foundation announces highlights of its 2025 programme, with exhibitions, events and research seasons taking place across Henry Moore Studios & Gardens in Hertfordshire and Henry Moore Institute in Leeds.

Founded by the world-renowned sculptor Henry Moore (1898-1986) in 1977, the Henry Moore Foundation works to encourage public appreciation of the visual arts through supporting research, innovation and exhibitions.

Main image: Emii Alrai, Passing of the Lilies 2021. Jerwood Arts. Photo: Anna Arca.

Henry Moore Institute, Leeds

In 2025, Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, the city where Henry Moore began his training, will present a diverse programme of sculpture, giving a platform to artists who push the boundaries of the art-form.

Exhibitions will include SUNLIGHT: Roger Ackling (4 April – 22 June 2025), the most expansive exhibition of the late artist’s work. In the summer, the Institute will present Fragment and Form: Emii Alrai, Mónica Mays and Dominique White (18 July – 2 November 2025), an exhibition bringing together the work of three contemporary artists who continue the enduring relationship between history and materiality in sculpture in thought-provoking new ways.

At the end of the year, Beyond the Visual (28 November 2025 – 8 March 2026) will mark the culmination of a three-year Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Exhibition Fund research project, the exhibition will provide ways of experiencing art beyond sight.

The Henry Moore Institute. Photo: Min Young Lim.
A group of children Children play hide and seek around Henry Moore's huge bronze sculpture 'Large Figure in a Shelter'.
Children play hide and seek around Henry Moore's 'Large Figure in a Shelter' 1984. Photo: Min Young Lim.

Henry Moore Studios & Gardens, Hertfordshire

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.

From 1940 until his death in 1986, Moore lived and worked in rural Hertfordshire, where he acquired over 70 acres of land and set up various studios, creating the ideal environment in which he could make and display his work, and cater to an international demand for exhibitions.

Now open to visitors, Henry Moore Studios & Gardens offers a unique insight into the artist’s working practice and showcases a large selection of Moore’s renowned monumental sculptures in the landscape in which they were created. It is also home to the Henry Moore Archive, one of the largest single-artist archives in the world.

Spring 2025

 

Encounters

April – October 2025

Henry Moore Studios & Gardens
A season of stories and events

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.

Henry Moore and I.M. Pei applaud each other in delight after the inauguration of 'Three Forms Vertebrae' 1978 (LH 580a) in Dallas. Photo: Jim Murray Film.

SUNLIGHT: Roger Ackling

4 April – 22 June 2025

Henry Moore Institute
Sculpture Galleries
Free entry

Roger Ackling, 'Voewood' 2011-12. © Estate of the Artist. Courtesy Annely Juda Fine Art, London.

SUNLIGHT: Roger Ackling is the first survey and most comprehensive exhibition of the work of artist Roger Ackling (1947-2014), one of the most quietly influential artists of the late twentieth century.

For fifty years Ackling consistently made objects by burning wood – focusing sunlight through the lens of a hand-held magnifying glass to scorch repeated patterns of lines on the surface. Collecting driftwood from the beach at Weybourne near his home on the Norfolk coastline, as well as reclaimed broken and discarded materials, Ackling took little from the world to make his work and left nothing beyond a wisp of smoke in the air.

This exhibition reveals the breadth of Ackling’s practice, from his earliest experiments with a lens, to his final work. Ackling is best known for his work on found driftwood, which will be on display alongside lesser-known sculptures made using domestic wooden objects and tools, and those incorporating ready-made elements such as elastic bands and mapping pins. After his death, Roger Ackling’s archive was gifted to Leeds Museums & Galleries’ Archive of Sculptors’ Papers, which is housed at Henry Moore Institute. Photographs, sketches, notes and even the bag he took out with him when making work are on display in the exhibition, providing a full picture of the artist and his work.

SUNLIGHT: Roger Ackling is curated by Amanda Geitner and is developed in partnership with the Artist’s Estate, Annely Juda Fine Art, Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery, and the Pier Arts Centre.

An accompanying hardback publication includes contributions from Sylvia Ackling, Amanda Geitner, Rosy Gray, Dean Hughes, Louis Nixon and Ian Parker, alongside a wealth of illustrations of both works and archival material.

Sarah Casey: Negative Mass Balance

4 April – 22 June 2025

Henry Moore Institute
Study Gallery
Free entry

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.

Sarah Casey, 'Ice Watch (Bietshhorn)' 2023.

Research Season

May – November 2025

In celebration of Bradford’s year as UK City of Culture 2025, Henry Moore Institute and Bradford 2025 are collaborating on a series of exciting events celebrating the role that sculpture plays in the city, asking what sculpture means for Bradford and how it is helping to shape the city’s future. The full programme will be announced in spring 2025.

Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture logo

Summer 2025

 

Fragment and Form: Emii Alrai, Mónica Mays, Dominique White

18 July – 2 November 2025

Henry Moore Institute
Sculpture Galleries
Free entry

The relationship between history, myth and materiality has been a central concern throughout the evolution of sculpture. From the enduring qualities of marble in classical depictions to the use of industrial and found materials more recently, sculptors have chosen materials not merely for their physical properties, but for their ability to deepen meaning and embody cultural, political, and spiritual narratives.

Fragment and Form will continue the dialogue between history and materiality in sculpture through the work of three contemporary artists of the same generation: Emii Alrai, Mónica Mays and Dominique White. While distinct, the work of each artist converges in the exploration of heritage, displacement and the ways in which personal and collective histories are preserved, marginalised and contested through materiality. The notion of history being both formed and fragmented resonates throughout the exhibition, finding parity in the artists’ material choices which so often serve as a metaphor for the complexities of representing history itself.

Emii Alrai is a British-Iraqi artist whose work delves into themes of heritage, nostalgia, and the colonial legacy of looted artefacts. Through large scale sculptural installations that mimic archaeological ruins and ancient monuments, she reimagines museum objects using plaster, clay and metal. These forged artefacts are often presented as decaying and deteriorating through her material explorations of forgery. Through these installations, Alrai critically examines museum curation and the romanticised ways histories are told and displayed.

Emii Alrai, 'Reverse Defense' 2022. Courtesy Workplace Foundation. Photo: Matt Denham.

Mónica Mays is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores themes of cultural identity, memory and materiality, often through the lens of domestic objects and everyday rituals. Drawing on her Spanish heritage, Mays creates sculptures, installations and assemblages that blend organic materials with found objects, evoking a sense of fragmented history and personal mythology. Her work employs humble, familiar items with layers of cultural significance and memory. By merging craft traditions with conceptual strategies, Mays invites viewers to reconsider the roles of material culture and forgotten narratives in shaping contemporary identity.

Mónica Mays, 'Conveyor' 2023. Courtesy the artist.

Dominique White is a British artist whose sculpture and installation work explores diaspora, Black identity and Afrofuturism. Drawing on myth, history and speculative fiction, she creates sculptures resembling remnants of a sunken world, using materials such as rope, metal, palm fronds and shells. Typically weathered or corroded, her materials mirror tools of the nation-state, symbolising resilience as well as the deterioration of systems of power. White’s work speaks to abolitionist ideals, linking the destruction of oppressive systems to new possibilities. Her sculptures reference the Middle Passage, bridging themes of survival, rebirth and shifting identities, while harnessing a concern for materiality to symbolise both decay and transformation, ultimately pointing to a reimagined, liberated future.

Dominique White, 'May you break free and outlive your enemy' 2021. Installation view at La Casa Encendida (Madrid, ES) 2023. Courtesy Enea Righi Collection, VEDA and the artist. Photo: La Casa Encendida.

Passing Strange: British Land Art Through Time

18 July – 2 November 2025

Henry Moore Institute
Study Gallery
Free entry

This display will showcase the exceptionally rich collection of British land art in the Leeds Sculpture Collections which are managed and developed in partnership between Leeds Museums and Galleries and Henry Moore Institute. Featuring work by Tacita Dean (b.1965), Anya Gallaccio (b.1963), Andy Goldsworthy (b.1956), John Hilliard (b.1945) and David Nash (b.1945), it considers how process, transition and duration are used by these artists to defamiliarise landscape and natural forms. The exhibition takes its title from Desdemona’s response to Othello’s tales of adventure through extraordinary landscapes in Shakespeare’s Othello.

Tacita Dean’s sound work Trying to Find Spiral Jetty 1997 responds to the title in its narration of the artist’s attempt to locate Robert Smithson’s monumental work of land art in an isolated part of Utah, an experience that Dean and her travelling companion Gregory Sax frequently consider ‘strange’. Andy Goldsworthy’s leaf sculptures provoke a similar strangeness in their transformation natural forms into uncanny shapes that invite touch but threaten to crumble.

Other works will include John Hilliard’s landscape photography of water in three states of matter, Anya Gallaccio’s transformation of six dozen red roses into a solid block of pastel and David Nash’s drawings of his ‘planted’ works in which trees grow to form living sculptures.

Collectively these artists present an alternative vision of land art than that associated with American artists such as Smithson and Michael Heizer. Embracing transience and rebirth, the work on display poses pressing questions about humankind’s strained relationship with the environment in our contemporary moment of the Anthropocene and the climate crisis. By centring process and ephemerality, these works speak against the commercialisation and commodification of the natural world.

Autumn 2025

 

Beyond the Visual

28 November 2025 – 8 March 2026

Henry Moore Institute
Sculpture Galleries and Study Gallery
Free entry

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.

A splayed hand touching a bronze plate with lines of single black letters recessed into it. The letters are from a Snellen eye test chart and reduce in size from top to bottom.
Aaron McPeake, 'Once I Saw it All' 2022, bell bronze (casting of Snellen Chart).
UK Research and Innovation: Arts and Humanities Research Council logo
Chelsea College of Arts, UAL logo
Shape Arts

For further information, images, or to arrange a visit please contact:

Emily Dodgson, Head of Marketing & Enterprise
Henry Moore Foundation
emily.dodgson@henry-moore.org

Kitty Malton
Sam Talbot
kitty@sam-talbot.com

Matthew Brown
Sam Talbot
matthew@sam-talbot.com

Notes to Editors

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