Exhibition
Sarah Casey: Negative Mass Balance
Henry Moore Institute, Leeds
Free Entry
Free Entry
Sarah Casey’s new body of 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. Casey 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?
About the artist
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.
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, Switzerland (2023). In 2024 she won the John Muir Trust Creative Freedom Prize for 3D work and the William Littlejohn Award from Royal Scottish Academy.
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, in dialogue with Swiss archaeologists from the cantons of Valais and Bern.
Sarah Casey – ‘I make drawings using light, shadow and space.’
In this film, researcher Sarah Casey talks about her practice and how she used the library at the Henry Moore Institute in 2021 to make new work – sculptural drawings with paper that test the limits of visibility and material existence.
Getting here
Henry Moore Institute
74 The Headrow
Leeds
LS1 3AH
United Kingdom
T: 01132 467 467
E: institute@henry-moore.org
