On 24 November 2025, Homerton students, fellows, and staff spent a day at Henry Moore Studios & Gardens in a co-programmed visit with the Henry Moore Foundation.
Beneath a clear, brittle sky, the group moved through the landscape that shaped Moore's imagination, a place where art and everyday life still feel entwined.
The day was part of Embodied Change: site, material, and future forms, an ongoing collaboration between Homerton College and the Foundation that we will develop further through future events and displays.
The visit united members of the Homerton community with diverse academic and personal backgrounds, all gathered in shared curiosity.
The opportunity opened space for what I'd call a material encounter, direct engagement with objects, surfaces, and settings that shows how meaning comes from touch, scale, and context as much as from seeing.
We began at Hoglands, the Grade II-listed medieval house where Henry, Irina, and Mary Moore lived. Curated by Mary Moore, the house reads like a domestic archive: books, collected objects, and artworks, including specimens of petrified wood, Mesoamerican and African sculpture, prints, and paintings, assembled in a way that reveals the artist's habits of attention.
These rooms make visible the curious materials and forms that fed Moore's practice, and they remind us that studio production is never disconnected from the earlier, quiet work of looking and gathering.
Henry Moore's family home, Hoglands. Photo: Jonty Wilde -
Reproduced by permission of the Henry Moore Foundation.
Outside, the tour opened at Family Group (1948-49, cast c.1985), a commission for Walter Gropius's Village College at Impington.
The sculpture's civic intent was plain; here is a public work imagined as part of communal life. That felt significant for our mixed cohort, students, fellows, and staff, who reflected on the potential of public art to shape education, belonging, and everyday civic practices.
From there, we moved to Locking Piece (1962-63, cast 1963), where Moore's move towards abstraction is manifest. The bronze's forms invite interpretation rather than prescribe it, and in the low winter light, its surfaces prompted conversation about presence, gesture, and scale. How might siting and commissioning practices open new forms of conversation about agency and memory?
The studios themselves offered a counterpoint to those finished works. Rooms full of maquettes, plaster casts, and tools revealed the incremental thinking of an artist at work. To see the sketches and models was to witness the process, the experiments, adjustments, and material tests that precede a final form.
The day closed in The Aisled Barn, where tapestry collaborations with the West Dean Tapestry Studio culminate. The woven translation of Moore's drawings, threaded, textured, and tactile, felt like a final lesson in how material translation reshapes meaning.
Participants left in different states of reflection. For some, the day provided a clearer understanding of a global art icon. For others, it felt like an ethnographic field trip that engaged them with ideas about civic responsibility, environmental stewardship, and the politics of public space. Many simply enjoyed a communal day of walking, talking, and taking pauses, an opportunity to experience art together in the outdoor setting that influenced it.
Extract from Henry Moore: The Language of Sculpture
