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Catalogue 

Henry Moore: Back to a Land
Sarah Coulson
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Sarah Coulson describes how involving a poet in the creation of a catalogue has added new insights into Henry Moore’s work

The sculptor Henry Moore was born in the mining town of Castleford, just a few miles from the 18th-century designed landscape that is now home to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP).

The artist’s deeply felt connection to this area, with its stark visual contrasts – from rolling hills and open moors to the physical scars of industry – is well documented.

Back to a Land interrogates Moore’s relationship with land, not simply landscape, but the layers that lie beneath and the intense physicality of the interior.

The exhibition title is drawn from Jacquetta Hawkes’ seminal book from 1951, A Land, which Moore illustrated, and is concerned with the geology of Britain and how our impressions of the land are formed as much by physical landforms and weather as by the interpretation of artists and poets.
 
Another connection that took on particular significance is that between Moore and the poet WH Auden. At the time of Auden’s death, Moore was producing a portfolio of lithographs to accompany a selection of the poet’s verse.

The resultant darkly atmospheric portrayals of landscape form an important strand in the exhibition. Moore wrote of how he didn’t merely want to illustrate the poems “but to complement, or even contrast” them – and this idea became central to the development of our publication.
 
We were keen not to replicate the existent academic library that exists on Moore, but to contribute a publication which itself resonated more fully with the works on a creative level. With Moore’s relationship with Auden and Hawkes’ A Land in mind, we invited poet Simon Armitage to respond to the exhibition.
 
Armitage visited the gallery as the works were being unpacked and installed, a process he likened to “mass exhumation, followed by individual acts of resurrection”.

Sitting on the floor or wandering through the spaces, he made notes and catalogued his instinctive reactions as though sketching.
 
As Moore interpreted and distilled the physical world, so Armitage observed and filtered Moore’s work with a keenly individual eye. He was not interested in what he describes as the “party line” – art history’s language – and he kept conversations about the recorded and accepted details of each work to a minimum.

As a result, his reading of Moore’s sculpture and drawings in six poems proved moving, breathtaking and, above all, uniquely observed. It manages to retain the clarity of his own voice while engaging intimately with the objects.

In addition to his own new work, Armitage selected nine poems by fellow Yorkshire poet Ted Hughes, all of which link land and the body, a link fundamental to Moore’s practice.

The exhibition’s many-layered publication is bound together by a contextual essay by YSP’s senior curator, Helen Pheby, and extraordinary in-situ photography.

Sculpture in the open-air changes radically in different light and weather conditions, and in its relationship with its wider context of sky, trees and grassland.
 
Photographer Jonty Wilde has been capturing Moore’s work at YSP for over two decades and has developed a deep understanding of the resonances between the work and the surrounding landscape across the seasons.

There are few arts organisations fortunate enough to show Moore’s work in snow, driving rain, sunshine, and surrounded by a flock of sheep.

Sarah Coulson is a curator at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Henry Moore: Back to a Land is at YSP until 6 September


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