A new film series by the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich takes artworks beyond the gallery walls as they visit meaningful locations from their past.
Day Release explores how some of the centre’s most well-known works would feel about how the world has changed since their creation.
In the series of film shorts, the artwork acts as a third character and a catalyst for conversation. The first follows Francis Bacon’s 1957 portrait of Peter Lacy, Study for Portrait of P.L., no. 2 back to Bacon’s haunt in Soho.
The Colony Room Club, where Lacy and Bacon first met, facilitates a meeting between Lacy and a young man who struggles to show public affection to his boyfriend. Between the two, the film explores how attitudes towards the LGBTQ+ community have changed since Bacon’s work was finished.
Bacon’s work will be followed by a feature on Henry Moore’s Mother and Child (1932) sculpture as it travels to a playground in Castleford, where the artist was born.
The short episode is intended to examine how Moore broke generational social structures as it parallels the life of a teenager who acts as a carer for her mother, with social barriers old and new reaching a dialogue with one another.
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Director of the Sainsbury Centre, Jago Cooper, said: “Taking art out of the museum to where they might actually want to be for the day, totally changes how that work can be experienced and understood today.
“It enables you to instantly recognise how society either has or hasn’t changed since the emotional power of that work was materialised half a century ago.”
The programme hopes to engage visitors on a more emotional level and encourage them to connect with the artworks in a way that brings the relationships they represent to life.
The series is part of the gallery’s Living Art ethos, which aims to reinvent how people interact with art by inviting them to view and treat works as “living entities”.
Look out for a profile of Jago Cooper in the July/August 2025 issue of Museums Journal