LR Vandy Brings Rope, Ritual, and Resistance to Yorkshire Sculpture Park in First Solo Museum Show
A coil of rope can read as a tool, a tether, or a trace of labor. At the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP), London-based sculptor LR Vandy turns that everyday material into the conceptual spine of “LR Vandy: Rise,” her first solo museum exhibition, on view through September 13, 2026.
Produced in partnership with London’s October Gallery, the exhibition is installed across YSP’s indoor galleries and its grounds, positioning the institution’s landscape as more than a backdrop. The show’s structure insists on continuity between interior and exterior, between the controlled conditions of the gallery and the open air of the park.
At the center of the indoor presentation is “A Call to Dance,” a new sculpture Vandy created onsite. With its twisting, vertical form, the work recalls a maypole, invoking seasonal community traditions and the choreography of collective ritual. Yet its material presence also carries a sharper edge: rope becomes a language of resistance, binding together histories that are often kept separate in public memory.
That tension runs throughout “Rise.” Vandy’s practice frequently returns to rope as a metaphor and as evidence, pointing to the material’s entanglement with colonial expansion and the histories of slavery, international trade, and commodity circulation. In this context, fiber is not simply sculptural matter; it is a record of movement, extraction, and power.
Other new works extend the exhibition’s focus through found objects. Vandy incorporates elements such as weaving loom shuttles and barrel rings into circular, wall-based forms. The components carry their own associations with labor and production, while their compositional arrangement suggests mandalas, offering a visual structure that feels meditative, even grounding. The effect is deliberately double: the works invite sustained looking while keeping the viewer aware of the economic and human systems embedded in the materials.
Outside, a monumental sculpture anchors the project’s dialogue with the park. “Dancing in Time, The Ties That Bind Us” (2023) was commissioned by National Museums Liverpool for the International Slavery Museum’s Martin Luther King Pop Up series. Installed at YSP, the work reinforces the exhibition’s refusal of neat boundaries, extending Vandy’s inquiry into the space where constructed landscape meets the natural environment.
In statements accompanying the exhibition, Vandy has described YSP as an opportunity to expand recurring themes through a site-specific installation and to build an immersive, sensory experience rooted in materiality. She has also framed the title “Rise” as a reference to resilience, protest, liberation, and collective joy, with rituals and dance serving as recurring touchstones.
Taken together, “LR Vandy: Rise” positions sculpture as both environment and argument: a poetic investigation of what materials carry, what histories they conceal, and how contemporary life remains knotted to the infrastructures of trade and power that shaped earlier centuries.
