Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP) is delighted to announce its 2025 programme featuring the first major UK museum exhibition focused on the sculptural works of acclaimed South African artist William Kentridge. Alongside this headline show are further solo exhibitions by UK artists Laura Ellen Bacon, Felicity Aylieff and Claye Bowler, and Australian artist Jordy Kerwick.

The 2025 programme is an exploration of sculptural methods, practice, and materials, thoughtfully composed to feed the mind, body and soul of our audience. Each exhibition presents the artist’s individual approach to sculpture, and all celebrate the making process. William Kentridge, known for his operatic and film-based works and drawing, throws the spotlight on his sculpture practice. Felicity Aylieff and Laura Ellen Bacon, both working with traditional materials of clay and willow bring them into dialogue with large, architectural-scale installations. Claye Bowler explores conversations about life and death in a new body of work where sculpture, sound and visitors come together. Jordy Kerwick, who in recent years has transitioned into sculpture alongside painting, brings to life imaginary realms and fantastical creatures in his first major UK museum solo exhibition.

The programme draws visitors into YSP’s exceptional galleries, whilst celebrating its magnificent landscape with sculpture sited outdoors. New monumental works by Marc Quinn and Abigail Reynolds will be sited in the landscape, both drawing on inspiration from nature. Work by visiting artists also explores the natural world. Wakefield-based artist Tony Wade draws the venerable and beautiful ancient trees at YSP, and poet Matt Howard has a particular interest in the birds that inhabit the 500-acre landscape of woods, lakes, and parkland. In perceiving the world through art and sculpture, YSP remains a centre for creative connection which is reinforced in an inspiring learning and events programme throughout the seasons.

YSP is committed to supporting artistic development with its residency programme, working with contemporary artists George Moody, who was the recipient of the 2024 Yorkshire Graduate Award, and Nwando Ebizie, who is in the early months of a year-long residency.

Championing the best in contemporary craft, design and making, YSP Shops has curated three exhibitions in 2025. Opening in March, Russell Wilson will present new paintings celebrating the joy and optimism of spring. Summer sees the illustrator Lesley Barnes come together with the painter Ross McAuley for a playful exhibition of new work made especially for YSP. In November, painter and printmaker Andrew Waddington will exhibit works which depict the Cornish and Yorkshire landscapes alongside one another. YSP is a registered charity and accredited museum in West Yorkshire and all works presented in the retail programme are for sale. Proceeds from sales help YSP to share incredible art and continue to create meaningful, enjoyable experiences for everyone in a unique environment.

Tony Wade: Keepers of Time
15 February – 13 July 2025
YSP Centre

Keepers of Timeby Wakefield-based artist Tony Wade celebrates the majesty of trees, time beyond our lifespans, mindfulness, and nature connectedness, inviting us to be open to the beauty in our environment. It presents a series of intricate digital drawings of the oldest trees at YSP created over the last year as part of Wade’s documentation of ancient and veteran trees for the Woodland Trust’s Ancient Tree Inventory.

Spending time at YSP in different seasons, Wade made drawings of trees both with and without their foliage. These include an ancient ash, veteran common sycamores, an ancient field maple and veteran beeches, many aged between 300 and 400 years, and so dating to periods of significant change in landscape design on the Bretton Estate. Using a tablet and stylus allowed the artist to zoom in on each section of tree to achieve a level of detail not possible with pen and ink. Working partly in his studio with reference sketches and photographs, Wade completed the drawings whilst sitting in front of each tree, gradually refining the textures, lighting, and composition.

Wade currently has a studio at The Art House, Wakefield and in the 1980s he studied Fine Art at Bretton Hall College, situated in what is now YSP. He often works within communities and, as part of Keepers of Time, spent time with the Wakefield-based Appletree Ladies Group to explore and document trees within their locality and at YSP. The artist has generously donated a drawing which has been produced as a limited-edition print, with all proceeds benefitting YSP’s work as a registered charity and accredited museum.

George Moody
Residency 1 – 16 March 2025
Boathouse display May 2025
Yorkshire Graduate Award 2024

The recipient of the YSP Yorkshire Graduate Award in 2024, George Moody will spend two weeks in residence at YSP in March engaged in research and developing new work for display in the lakeside Boathouse in May. Moody recently graduated from the University of Leeds with an MA in Performance Design. Their multi-disciplinary practice spans bio art, sculpture, photography, installation and digital technologies, and they are inspired by the ideas of Queer Ecology (the combination of Queer theory and Eco-criticism), to tune into the unique rhythms of nature.

Moody plans to collect and combine water samples from YSP’s lake with decomposable bioplastics made from algae to produce a series of seasonal ‘bio paintings’, experimenting with natural and artificial light forms to activate these works. They hope to learn about the lifespan of bioplastics and how the natural environment will impact the material’s growth.

Felicity Aylieff: Expressions in Blue
5 April – 14 September 2025
The Weston Gallery and Outdoors

Expressions in Blueis an extraordinary forest of monumental porcelain forms by renowned ceramicist Felicity Aylieff. Painted in cobalt blue underglaze with expressive, abstract brushstrokes, these hand-thrown ceramic vessels and stacked monoliths stand up to five-metres high. Shown in The Weston Gallery and outdoors, the organic energy of their surfaces will resonate with the forms and rhythms of the 18th-century landscape beyond.

Over the past two decades Aylieff has worked in China, collaborating with craftspeople in Jingdezhen, for centuries a city known for its high-quality porcelain production. Her close working relationships with Chinese experts have enabled her to push the limits of her work in this challenging material, significantly increasing its scale. Ambitious and innovative in their physical realisation, the works also demonstrate a contemporary reinterpretation of classic Chinese blue and white porcelain, which Aylieff describes as ‘new Ming’.

Shown alongside the porcelain forms, photographs reveal the remarkable process of making and its sheer physicality. Also on display is a selection from Aylieff’s expansive range of mark-making tools, including giant horsehair brushes used to whip around the vessels and create energetic flicks and splashes.

Felicity Aylieff said:“Exhibiting my monumental porcelain vessels at Yorkshire Sculpture Park is an incredible opportunity. I am excited to see them come alive against the rich backdrop of rolling countryside in one of the best places to show sculpture in Britain.”

The exhibition was first shown at The Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Expressions in Blue has been made possible through support and collaboration with Adrian Sassoon, London, who represent the artist internationally.

Laura Ellen Bacon
5 April – 7 September 2025
Chapel

Using ancient materials and techniques, Derbyshire-based artist Laura Ellen Bacon will make an immersive and embracing installation for YSP’s 18th-century Chapel. Woven in willow, a sustainable and warm material, the work will respond to the historic architecture with its abstract forms and huge scale creating a stunning and compelling sensory experience.

Bacon will create a wide, high sculptural form that people can stand within, mesmerised by the sensory beauty of its material and the intricate and powerful process of making. To create the work, the artist will work on site over eight weeks constructing the sculpture from scratch, using willow to draw in space and to make a self-supporting structure that through its material and form conjures a primal instinct to nest and to connect with the natural world. Through an accompanying series of events with the artist YSP’s innovative learning team will explore the themes, processes and making of the work.

Laura Ellen Bacon said:“To be offered the chance to create new work that feels rooted to this historic building and part of its unique atmosphere is a privilege. The visual gestures of both vigour and stillness in the shape of this woven work will be evidence of my physical input and also my quiet, total absorption of the sense of place.”

Exhibition supported by Hignell Gallery.

William Kentridge: The Pull of Gravity
28 June 2025 – 19 April 2026
Underground Gallery and Outdoors

Headlining Yorkshire Sculpture Park’s 2025 programme is a landmark exhibition by celebrated artist William Kentridge. It marks the first museum presentation outside South Africa to focus on his sculpture, comprising over 40 works made between 2007 and 2024. This ambitious project spans the gallery and surrounding gardens, and premieres Paper Procession, a new commission of six monumental, coloured sculptures that parade through YSP’s historic landscape.

In addition to an extensive body of sculpture, the exhibition features the first institutional presentation of Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot (2020-24), a series of films begun during the Covid-19 lockdown, as well as the UK museum debut of the 7-channel film, More Sweetly Play the Dance (2015).

William Kentridge (b.1955) is known for his work across a range of media, including drawing, animated films, theatre and opera productions. From a standpoint that rejects certainty, his practice questions grand narratives from history, politics, science, literature and music, alongside an ongoing interrogation of the legacy of colonialism. Kentridge has lived in Johannesburg throughout his life and his work is inextricably connected to the sociopolitical history and life of South Africa.

Over the last two decades, sculpture has increasingly become a key part of Kentridge’s practice, taking drawing into three dimensions and developing from puppetry, film and stage props. YSP’s exhibition presents a selection of the artist’s sculpture from this period across different scales and media, including bronze, steel, paper, cardboard, plaster, wood and found objects. Emerging from Kentridge’s ongoing exploration of shadows, ciphers, and fragments, his sculptures delve into how the essence of form is constructed and perceived. They transform intangible concepts into tangible objects, examining the relationship between lightness and weight. The exhibition reflects how the artist tests the boundaries of the medium and its potential to embody ideas and question ways of seeing.

Revealing Kentridge’s engagement with the history of sculpture-making are works that reference wide-ranging sources of inspiration, from the ancient figure of Laocoön (27 BC–68 AD) to Picasso’s bronze The She Goat (1950), along with several horse sculptures that subvert the traditions of heroic equestrian statuary. The artist’s kinship with early 20th-century avant-garde movements such as Dada and Surrealism also manifests in his celebration of the illogical and darkly humorous.

Running throughout the exhibition, from table-top to monumental scale, are bronzes known as ‘Glyphs’ that demonstrate Kentridge’s distinctive sculptural language. Depicting objects from domestic or studio life – such as a typewriter, coffee pot, and scissors – together with animals, birds and figures, these symbols repeat across his work. Grouped together in works such as Lexicon (2017), Paragraph II (2018) and Cursive (2020), they appear as sentences to be constructed or puzzles to be solved and are ripe with potential meaning.

Kentridge’s works are seen outdoors in the context of YSP’s landscape and far-reaching vistas. At the top of a sloping garden, large-scale bronzes process against the backdrop of a curving early 19th-century brick wall. Each over three metres in height, these sculptures include a striding figure with megaphone head, an ampersand, and a cat. The six dynamic forms of the new commission Paper Procession (2024) stand over four metres high. Initially conceived from hand-torn paper collaged to evoke figures, the bold colours of these painted steel sculptures contrast with the dark yew hedge beyond.

In addition to sculpture, a selection of films, tapestry, and drawings will be displayed, drawn together in an exhibition design by one of Kentridge’s long-term collaborators, Sabine Theunissen. In the central gallery space two immersive films will be shown in rotation across seven screens that wrap around the viewer. The iconic More Sweetly Play the Dance (2015) is a caravan of figures in silhouette, including a brass band, animated skeletons, and figures that reference the West African Ebola outbreak. Oh To Believe in Another World (2022) explores composer Dmitri Shostakovich’s troubled relationship with the despotic Stalin through the lens of his Symphony No.10. Filmed in a model museum, it uses puppetry and collage to portray four decades of Soviet history.

At YSP Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot (2020-24) also has its first institutional presentation since premiering in Venice during the 2024 Biennale. The making of this series of episodic, half-hour-long films began during the first Covid-19 pandemic lockdown in 2020. Together the films represent the artist’s life in the studio, conveying the energy and agency of making.

Visitors will be able to engage with a programme of activities at YSP, drawing on themes in Kentridge’s work. A catalogue featuring a newly commissioned essay by Tamar Garb and in-situ photography will be published to coincide with the exhibition, and will be for sale online and in the YSP shop.

The exhibition is made possible by the Sakana Foundation, Goodman Gallery, Hauser & Wirth, and Lia Rumma. Supported by the William Kentridge Exhibition Circle. Additional support from Stonehage Fleming.

Jordy Kerwick: One to give. One to take away (Unum dare. Unum ut auferat)
27 September 2025 – 22 February 2026
The Weston Gallery and Outdoors

Jordy Kerwick is an Australian painter and sculptor now living in southern France. His work creates a world of lively curiosity and psychological tension, inhabited by creatures that evoke the magic of myths and fairytales. Mythology has long been at the heart of human civilisation, serving as a cultural compass and providing explanations for the mysteries of life. Kerwick’s paintings combine bold colour and pattern with distinctive flattened perspective, and more recently, his whimsical and hybrid animals have taken life in sculpture, rendered in materials including bronze, stone, found objects and fake fur.

Developed especially for YSP, Kerwick’s Weston Gallery exhibition centres on the artist’s fictional narrative that whilst renovating his historic chateau home, he unearthed these fantastical sculptures within a hidden vault. Mysterious relics from an undocumented civilisation, they portray a cast of characters from double-headed wolves, tigers, and cobras, to bears, and unicorns. The paintings are presented as Kerwick’s response to this surprising discovery. This imagined history reflects a central theme of his practice: the power of storytelling to shape perception, blur boundaries and create alternative worlds.

Outdoors, new sculptures will be sited in the landscape, joining Hydra vs Bear (2023) which has been on display at YSP since 2023. In these works, two-headed animals frequently appear as representations of Kerwick’s children, reflecting his desire to create whimsical creatures to amuse and delight his young family.

Jordy Kerwick said:“It is an absolute honour and extremely humbling to have the opportunity to present new and existing works in one of the world’s premier museums. As my work often deals with mythology and imagined worlds, I’m thrilled to be presenting sculpture and painting that explore a reimagined history. Using a broad range of mediums, these works question our learned perceptions of what and who we were once upon a time.”

Kerwick is a self-taught artist, who began his artistic journey in 2016 initially focusing on still life paintings. He quickly built recognition with numerous exhibitions in Europe, the USA and Australia. His visual language evolved towards more figurative subject matter, influenced by artists such as Henri Matisse, and abstract painters including Robert Motherwell and Helen Frankenthaler.

Exhibition supported by Vigo Gallery.

Nwando Ebizie
September 2024 – September 2025
Residency

Nwando Ebizie is a visionary artist who works across different artforms and media to explore the possibility of new futures. She challenges audiences to question their perceived realities through art personas, experimental theatre, neuroscience, music and African diasporic ritualistic dance. With research as the foundation of her practice, Ebizie collaborates with artists, academics, filmmakers, musicians and dancers to bring together ideas and produce multilayered creative outputs.

In 2025, Ebizie continues her year-long residency with bi-monthly visits to YSP. She is exploring ideas of archetypal sculptural forms, the use of natural materials, and the incorporation of ceramics into her practice. She will also spend time sharing knowledge with Chuu Krydz Ikwuemesi, an academic specialising in the critically endangered Nigerian craft of Uli, a ritualised communal painting practice connected to ideas of land and home.

Claye Bowler: Dig Me a Grave
4 October – 2 November 2025
Chapel

This new body of work by Claye Bowler explores graves and burial chambers as sites for introspection and uses them to open conversations about how we process death and how we navigate living in its wake. Drawing from lived experience of transness, queerness, and disability, Bowler uses these perspectives to reflect on universal themes of waiting, transformation, and mortality. Sculptures made in plaster, latex, stone and metal, some of which visitors are invited to sit or lie within, will be accompanied by a soundscape inspired by traditional folk songs with themes relating to love and loss.

Claye Bowler featured in YSP’s group exhibition On Queer Groundin 2022 and in 2024 spent time on site as a recipient of an Arts Right Truth Residency with the University of York and YSP. His practice centres on the collection and documentation of experience, memory and the remnants of humanity. Bowler uses sculptural practices to highlight stories that are not historically collected through institutional means, often working with narratives of queerness and disability.

Supported by the Jerwood New Work Fund.

Supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

Art Outdoors

Abigail Reynolds: Anthronauts: Trilobite, 2024
Spring 2025
Country Park

Joining over 90 sculptures in the landscape this spring is a new sculpture by Abigail Reynolds from her series Anthronauts which invites visitors to see in a non-human way. Trilobite was originally commissioned for Chatsworth and is made from Corten steel. The curved sculpture is pierced with 120 glass lenses of different focal lengths. It echoes how the trilobite, an extinct marine animal with turret eyes, viewed its surroundings. Through it, Reynolds encourages our visitors to view the historic YSP landscape in a new way.

The work encourages a shifting visual perspective with different viewpoints as people move around the sculpture. The lenses prompt viewers to have an active and delightful interaction with the work, bringing fragments of the landscape into focus as they proceed, encouraging curiosity and wonder.

Marc Quinn: Event Horizon (Sabal), 2023
Summer 2025
Country Park

Marc Quinn’s extraordinary monumental sculpture spans five metres in width and is formed from highly reflective polished stainless steel. Sited this summer in YSP’s Country Park, the work was created for Quinn’s 2024 exhibition Light into Life at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and is a ‘portrait’ of a palm leaf from Kew’s Palm House. The artist worked with Kew scientist Dr William Baker to develop the work based on a Sabal palmetto tree leaf – one of the earth’s oldest plants. Quinn imagines the sculpture as a mirrored vortex through time and space to the beginnings of life on earth.

Reflecting YSP’s rich collection of trees, the mirror-polished sculpture reminds us of light’s vital role in sustaining life. The Country Park offers sweeping views across the historic Bretton Estate, home to YSP. Although this landscape may appear natural, it was carefully designed in the 18th-century, featuring man-made lakes and imported plants and trees. Diana Beaumont, who owned the estate from the late 1700s until her death, was an avid seed and specimen collector whose inquisitiveness and vision brought together the diverse array of native and non-native plants that continue to grow at YSP.

Event Horizon (Sabal) (2023) joins Shores of Desire (2011) which is installed outside The Weston at YSP.

The new additions by Quinn and Reynolds together amplify the rich connections that YSP makes between art and the natural world, and the way in which we think about the Park’s histories and futures.

YSP Shops Exhibition Programme

Russell Wilson: A Spring Table
8 March – 29 June 2025
YSP Centre

In spring 2025, YSP showcases new paintings by Derbyshire-based artist Russell Wilson. Known for his eclectic use of process and materials, Wilson works across diverse mediums including painting, ceramics and needle felting. A Spring Tablebrings together over 49 paintings, some depicting the YSP landscape and made especially for this exhibition.

Celebrating the abundance of spring and nature, the paintings feature landscapes and still life studies, capturing a feeling of optimism, with bright light and warmth. They highlight Wilson’s keen interest in plants, gardening, landscapes, and collections of antique pottery. Seasonal blooms and rolling hills are depicted on wooden panels using acrylic, gesso, and pencil crayons. Texture is added through defined brushstrokes, which become part of the composition and give Wilson’s work its distinctive energy.

Wilson’s still life paintings often incorporate a view through a window or a scene of the wider landscape, sometimes real or painted from memory, but which may also be imagined. Carefully selected items from the artist’s collections, pebbles and other natural objects on a table or windowsill may relate in some way to the view from the window. Landscape paintings often convey a subtle sense of atmosphere, originating from the physical activity of walking, noticing, and remembering encountered scenes – lines in fields, the shape of a tree, or an arresting colour.

Lesley Barnes and Ross McAuley: Fashion Play
12 July – 26 October 2025
YSP Centre

Lesley Barnes is an illustrator from Glasgow, Scotland and Ross McAuley is a painter from Toronto, Canada who collaborate to create sculptural work that explores how form, colour, and shape can dance in space. In 2019, Barnes created a pop-up book called Bauhaus Ballet (Laurence King Publishing) about Bauhaus artist Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet. Working on that book changed the direction of the duo’s work, who began experimenting with sculptural techniques using paper to suggest movement and form. Since then, they have expanded their practice using wood to make sculptural dancers that are playful and encourage exploration of form, shape and colour.

Fashion Playat YSP will feature beautifully designed, handmade wooden figures inspired by Barnes’ most recent book, Fashion Play (Counter-Print Books, 2024), an interactive publication for lovers of fashion, colour and pattern. The book is divided into three sections, allowing readers to mix and match fashion outfits in a playful manner, creating an endless fashion playground. As well as new sculptural works and illustrative prints, the exhibition will feature large-scale figurative mobiles, based on spots and stripes which are so synonymous with Barnes’ work.

Andrew Waddington: Betwixt and Between: The Poetry of Landscape
8 November 2025 – 22 February 2026
YSP Centre

Working from his studio in South East Cornwall, Andrew Waddington is a painter and a printmaker whose landscape-based work is primarily focused on nature and memory, incorporating elements of architecture and mythology, with interventions from poetry, art and music. Using a delicate colour palette, the exhibition at YSP features a range of media, including painting, print, and drawing. For the first time the artist depicts the Yorkshire landscape, alongside landscapes of Cornwall.

His paintings are an internal response to landscape rather than one of visual accuracy. When looking at a painting, the viewer does not know from which period of time the elements are from; animals and objects float and fade in and out, and perspective is not necessarily followed, although it still provides structure. This is reflected in the title of the exhibitionBetwixt and Between: The Poetry of Landscape.

Having grown up in the Vale of Aylesbury and Cornwall, Waddington started exhibiting after leaving art school, with solo exhibitions at Falmouth Art Gallery and Truro Cathedral which was of work entirely based on the Yorkshire poet Ted Hughes’ Crow poems; a writer who continues to be an influence on the artist’s work.

-ENDS-

Press enquiries
Mana Merikhy, Sutton / +44 (0)20 7183 3577 / mana@suttoncomms.com
YSP / +44 (0)1924 832 631 / comms@ysp.org.uk
Download images at ysp.org.uk/press

Listings information
Yorkshire Sculpture Park, West Bretton, Wakefield WF4 4LG
Near Wakefield and Barnsley – M1 Junction 38
+44 (0)1924 832631 | ysp.org.uk | @YSPsculpture
Check online for opening hours.
Book tickets at ysp.org.uk