Passing Strange: British Land Art through Time
Study Gallery, Henry Moore Institute
18 July – 2 November 2025
Free entry
Passing Strange: British Land Art through Time at Henry Moore Institute, Leeds will reappraise the British land art movement and consider how it continues to shape our understanding of landscape. The exhibition will examine this rich area of sculptural and conceptual experimentation from the 1970s to the present day.
Featuring work by Tacita Dean (b. 1965), Hamish Fulton (b. 1946), Anya Gallaccio (b. 1963), Andy Goldsworthy (b. 1956), John Hilliard (b. 1945) and David Nash (b. 1945), Passing Strange focusses on how process, transition and duration have been used by these artists to defamiliarise landscape and natural forms. The exhibition is entirely drawn from work in Leeds Museums and Galleries’ extensive modern sculpture collection.
Tacita Dean’s sound work Trying to Find Spiral Jetty 1997 presents a 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 describe as ‘strange’. Dean’s recording transmutes Smithson’s dramatic intervention in the American landscape into the airy impalpability of a time-based medium which loops continually through the gallery space.
Andy Goldsworthy’s leaf sculptures provoke a similar strangeness in their transformation of natural forms into uncanny shapes that invite touch but threaten to crumble. Goldsworthy’s folkish constructions, made only with what was available to him on his selected woodland sites, reflect questions of transience and decay in their delicate, organic materiality.
Other works include John Hilliard’s landscape photography of water in three states of matter displaying natural processes caught in constant energetic flux. Anya Gallaccio’s Six Dozen Red Roses 1992 proposes new creative potential born from decay. Also on display will be David Nash’s charcoal drawings, represented by Charred Egg – Three Cuts 1991 and drawings of his ‘planted’ works, in which trees grow to form living sculptures.
Collectively these artists working in a British context articulate an alternative vision of land art to the one presented by American artists such as Smithson and Michael Heizer. Supported by archival material by Richard Long (b. 1945), Goldsworthy and Nash, Passing Strange will explore how these artists embrace transience and rebirth rather than permanence and monumentality. The work on display poses pressing questions about humankind’s strained relationship with the environment in our contemporary moment of the Anthropocene and is set against the backdrop of debates surrounding land access and the climate crisis.
A symposium Anti-Monumentality and the Afterlives of ‘Land Art’ in Britain will accompany the exhibition. Taking place on 22 October 2025, the event will give a platform to the latest research into the histories, methods, theory and legacies of land art and will offer a critical study of its definition as an art historical category.
Symposium
Anti-Monumentality and the Afterlives of ‘Land Art’ in Britain
10:30–17:00
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Notes to editors
Leeds Museums and Galleries Sculpture Collections
Since the establishment of the partnership between Leeds City Council and the Henry Moore Foundation first began in 1982, Leeds has gained a reputation as an international centre for the study and appreciation of sculpture. At the heart of this collaboration are the Leeds Sculpture Collections which are managed in partnership between Leeds Museums and Galleries and Henry Moore Institute.
This collaboration has created one of the strongest collections of British sculpture in the world. Based at Leeds Art Gallery, the Leeds Sculpture Collections include finished sculptures, maquettes, models, works on paper and an Archive of Sculptors’ Papers housed at Henry Moore Institute.
The collections are principally British from c.1875 to the present day, with a particular focus on twentieth and twenty-first century works and an emphasis on diversifying the collection through new acquisitions. They seek to narrate the development of sculpture being made in Britain over the last century as broadly as possible by representing neglected practitioners as well as established ones, by incorporating monumental and architectural sculpture by means of drawings, maquettes and archival material, and by using the works on paper collection to represent the scope of contemporary practice alongside acquisitions of three-dimensional work.
Today the collections continue to develop, with a priority to address historical imbalances and increase holdings of work by under-represented practitioners to better represent the wealth and diversity of sculptural practice across an expanded field.
About Henry Moore Institute
Henry Moore Institute welcomes everyone to visit their galleries, research library and archive of sculptors’ papers to experience, enjoy and research sculpture from around the world. The newly refurbished Institute can be found in the centre of Leeds, the city where Henry Moore (1898–1986) began his training as a sculptor. Their changing programme of historical, modern and contemporary exhibitions and events encourage thinking about what sculpture is, how it is made and the artists who make it.
As part of the Henry Moore Foundation, they are a hub for sculpture, connecting a global network of artists and scholars, continuing research into the art form and ensuring that sculpture is accessible and celebrated by a wide audience.
The long-established partnership of Leeds City Council and the Henry Moore Foundation began with the development of the Sculpture Study Centre in Leeds Art Gallery in 1982 and led to the development of the Henry Moore Institute in 1993. It now represents an unparalleled collaboration in the collection, study and presentation of sculpture. The Leeds Sculpture Collections lies at the heart of their work together, underpinned by the complimentary research and curatorial expertise of both organisations.
Free entry
Open Tuesday to Sunday, 10:00–17:00
About the Henry Moore Foundation
The Henry Moore Foundation was founded by the artist and his family in 1977 to encourage public appreciation of the visual arts.
Today we support innovative sculpture projects, devise an imaginative programme of exhibitions and research worldwide, and preserve the legacy of Moore himself: one of the great sculptors of the 20th century, who did so much to bring the art form to a wider audience.
We run two venues, in Leeds and Hertfordshire, showing a mix of Moore’s own work and other sculpture.
We also fund a variety of sculpture projects through our Henry Moore Grants and Research programmes and we have a world-class collection of artworks which regularly tour both nationally and internationally.
A registered charity, we award grants to arts organisations around the world, with a mission to bring great sculpture to as many people as possible.