In 2026, Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP) presents a bold year-long programme of exhibitions, commissions and residencies that reflects on how artists navigate resilience, inheritance and transformation in a rapidly changing world. Set within 500 acres of historic parkland shaped by centuries of human and non-human activity, YSP is perfectly placed to hold conversations about land, material, memory and community.

From June, and at the heart of the new programme, YSP hosts a landmark exhibition in collaboration with Tia Collection. Marking the first ever group show held in the Underground Gallery, this is an important milestone for YSP and presents contemporary Indigenous North American art on an unprecedented scale in the UK. Artists including Rose B. Simpson, Raven Halfmoon, Jeffrey Gibson, Nicholas Galanin, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Marie Watt, Emmi Whitehorse and Yatika Starr Fields explore land, identity and materiality, honouring ancestral knowledge while imagining new futures. 

From spring, LR Vandy will transform The Weston Gallery with an exhibition rooted in maritime and textile histories, exploring communal rituals and joyful resistance. In summer, Jakob Rowlinson presents ROTATOR in the YSP Centre. An installation of suspended sculptures made using leather coloured with oak-gall dyes, it examines queer archives, craft, labour and the ecology of the Bretton Estate, in which YSP is situated. Yorkshire Graduate Award recipient Jim Ever also draws on connection and renewal, reimagining our relationship to nature during his site-based period of research and development. 

Outdoors, Andi Walker’s new slate quilt sculpture Wrapped in Cold Hard Comfort challenges our expectations of materials, and Thabo Mkwananzicreates a space for conversation and reflection in the landscape, drawing on ancestral wisdom and future-facing thinking.

YSP’s public and learning programmes will amplify and extend the themes of the 2026 programme. Through creative workshops, talks, resources and participatory projects, these programmes invite audiences to reflect, question and deepen their connection with the artwork and landscape that inspires them.

Complementing the main programme, the YSP shop and retail programme presents exhibitions by Louise Lockhart (The Printed Peanut), Annie Montgomerie and Angela Harding, highlighting heritage, craft and a playful reinterpretation of pattern, texture and nature.

Together, these projects affirm YSP as a place where land, art and community meet, and where the future is shaped through making, material and dialogue.
 

Hold to this Earth: Works by Contemporary Indigenous North American Artists from Tia Collection
13 June 2026 – 18 April 2027
Underground Gallery

Headlining YSP’s 2026 programme is a major presentation of work by contemporary Indigenous North American artists from Tia Collection. The first group exhibition staged in YSP’s prestigious Underground Gallery in its twenty-year history, brings together over 60 works by more than 30 artists, whose practices are rooted in deep relationships to land, cultural memory and community.

This exhibition offers a rare encounter with contemporary Indigenous North American art that is unprecedented in Europe. Spanning numerous regions and genres, it features a richly diverse range of sculpture, textiles, ceramics, photography, film and painting. Artists including Rose B. Simpson, Jeffrey Gibson, Nicholas Galanin, Raven Chacon, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Marie Watt, Emmi Whitehorse, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, George Morrison, Bob Haozous, Yatika Starr Fields, Tyrrell Tapaha, Eric-Paul Riege and Raven Halfmoonexplore identity, resilience and the enduring connections between body and place. Their work confronts ongoing histories of colonialism, erasure and displacement, while also celebrating creativity, sovereignty and Indigenous futurisms.

“This exhibition assembles some of the most visionary contemporary artists working now. Their perspectives offer urgent, moving and impactful insights into how we relate to land and to one another. It is an honour for YSP to host this historic gathering of contemporary North American Indigenous art, and to share these important voices with audiences across the UK.” – Dr Alex Hodby, Head of Programmes, YSP

With works drawn from across 50 years and multiple generations, the exhibition highlights both established voices and emerging artists who are shaping contemporary art today. Materials such as clay, hide, wool, beads and natural pigments become carriers of powerful stories, memory and tradition, rooted in a haptic connection to the earth. Newer modes of expression and understanding growing out of digital culture also speak to the shifting landscapes of Indigenous life in the 21st century.

A fascinating range of artworks explore aspects of these ideas from wide-ranging viewpoints. Rose B. Simpson’s Tonantzin (2021) is a potent ceramic figure linked to the matrilineal traditions of Santa Clara Pueblo. It takes its name from a pre-Columbian Aztec mother goddess and holds in its hand a piece of clay formed by the artist’s daughter, expressing a fundamental, ancient and bodily relationship to material.

Ancestral Map of Return (2023) by Nicholas Galanin is a star map painted on deer hide that honours Indigenous individuals held in institutional collections and offers a poignant reflection on lineage, belonging and cultural continuity.

Michael Namingha’s Altered Landscapes #13 (2021, 2025) is a sculptural photograph that documents wildfire smoke over New Mexico. It points to the environmental change that resonates globally and presents urgent questions around environmental justice at a regional, national and international level.

Presenting this artwork in a European context carries important responsibilities. The exhibition has been shaped through dialogue with Indigenous artists, advisors and Tia Collection to ensure culturally respectful presentation, while inviting UK audiences to engage deeply with perspectives often underrepresented in European institutions.

Founded in 2007 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and now with an expanded presence in London, Tia Collection is a global art collection committed to supporting artists and cultural institutions internationally. Through acquisitions, commissions, museum loans, scholarship, and philanthropic initiatives, it champions and amplifies historically marginalised voices and preserves vital artistic legacies, contributing to a more expansive and inclusive understanding of art history.

Tia Collection began with, and has maintained, a devoted focus on contemporary Indigenous American art, and has evolved into a dynamic platform where modern, contemporary, and broader Indigenous artistic traditions meaningfully intersect. Its mission extends beyond stewardship, building bridges, honouring artistic excellence in all its forms, and ensuring that the transformative power of creative expression reaches audiences worldwide.

“Tia Collection is proud to partner with YSP on this landmark exhibition, facilitating a vital exchange between contemporary Indigenous North American art and UK audiences. For nearly two decades, the Collection has supported and advocated for these visionary artists who are actively shaping global conversations on identity, sovereignty, and creative practice. This exhibition Hold to this Earth is a powerful demonstration of why their material and intellectual connections to the land, interdisciplinary practices, and their inherent future-facing perspectives, are vital to the entire landscape of contemporary art.” – Karon Hepburn, Director, Tia Collection

A fully illustrated catalogue will offer newly commissioned essays exploring land relations, material practices, sovereignty and Indigenous futures, providing an important resource for scholars, artists and audiences. YSP’s related public programme of events will develop a deeper understanding of contemporary Indigenous North American art within a UK and European context, where it has rarely been shown, and will emphasise its breadth, diversity and importance.

LR Vandy: Rise
From 14 March 2026
The Weston Gallery and Outdoors

Rise is an ambitious first solo museum exhibition by LR Vandy, created for The Weston Gallery at YSP. Vandy’s material-led practice is distinguished by her use of rope and found materials to explore power dynamics, cultural traditions, and histories of international trade. Vandy works with everyday objects that are transformed into reflections on migration, resilience, and interconnectedness, while reimagining the objects’ material and symbolic potential. She has developed a sustained engagement with rope as both material and metaphor since relocating her studio to the Historic Dockyard in Chatham, which is home to the last working Ropery in the UK, where they have been making rope in the same way for over 400 years.

Vandy will transform The Weston Gallery into an immersive environment dominated by a soaring rope maypole. The twisting and turning structure draws on the iconography of the maypole as a site of communal gathering and ritual, and an enduring emblem of renewal, growth, and collective movement. Surrounding the central motif will be a group of dynamic rope figures, building on a body of work the artist initiated in 2024, and a new series of wall-based mandalas first presented at the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair in 2025. Referencing the textile industry’s formative role in Britain’s industrial history, they extend her ongoing examination of labour, pattern, and material legacy.

Outdoors, Dancing in Time: The Ties That Bind Us (2023), standing at five metres high, continues Vandy’s exploration of dance as a form of unfettered expression and resistance. Commissioned by National Museums Liverpool for the International Slavery Museum’s Martin Luther King Pop Up series, the sculpture was first displayed on the Liverpool Waterfront and will now overlook YSP’s landscape.

“It is an honour to show my work at YSP. This opportunity to create a site-specific installation is a first for me, offering space to expand the scope of my work and ideas to mount a complex, sensory experience rooted in materiality. My practice centres the hidden human costs of colonialism, transportation systems and commodities, and the knotted histories of trade and power they contain. The title, Rise, references ideas of resilience, protest, liberation and collective joy explored through rituals and dance.” – LR Vandy

LR Vandy at YSP is supported by October Gallery.

Andi Walker: Wrapped in Cold Hard Comfort (2025)
Spring 2026
Outdoors

Leeds-based artist Andi Walker presents Wrapped in Cold Hard Comfort, a new outdoor sculpture to be revealed in the spring. Marking a pivotal development in Walker’s practice and moving from its foundations in textiles into sculptural form, the work expands their visual language through new materials and processes.

Taking the form of an articulated slate quilt draped over a chaise longue, the sculpture challenges assumptions around softness, pliability, and domesticity traditionally associated with textiles. By working with slate as their material, the artist emphasises contrasting qualities of weight, hardness and discomfort.

The physical act of stitching into its resistant surface is a metaphor for resilience, mirroring the daily persistence required by those living with chronic illness, disability, or adversity. As the work weathers and elements of it gradually disintegrate, it also reflects on the relationship between permanence and impermanence in outdoor sculpture.

Walker first worked at YSP in 2022, creating the participatory project Stitched Stories as part of the group exhibition On Queer Ground, and then displayed the resulting quilt in 2023. Wrapped in Cold Hard Comfort is made possible by an Arts Council England National Lottery Project Grant. YSP has guided Walker through the process of evolving their practice with curatorial and technical support, demonstrating our commitment to sustaining ongoing, nurturing relationships with artists.

Jim Ever 
Yorkshire Graduate Award Winner 2025
Residency 12 – 25 January 2026
Exhibition summer 2026, Boathouse

The recipient of the YSP Yorkshire Graduate Award 2025–26, Jim Ever, will spend two weeks in residence at YSP in January supported by the Curatorial and Technical teams. During his period of research, Ever will draw inspiration from the Park’s landscape and historic trees, focussing on reimagining our relationship with nature through image-making, sound and projection. This will lead into the development of new work for an audio-visual display on the lakeside Boathouse in summer.

Ever is a recent Fine Art graduate from Sheffield Hallam University, whose multi-disciplinary practice spans sound, collage, assemblage, video, installation, and sculpture. Often bringing together unexpected materials, his work explores the relationship between analogue and digital technologies, finding new conversations between traditional and experimental methods.

Residencies have long been central to YSP’s support for early-career artists. Through the Yorkshire Graduate Award, Ever will receive mentorship, on-site accommodation, and the opportunity to experiment, reflect, and share new ideas with audiences in YSP’s unique landscape setting.

Thabo Mkwananzi: UMFECE
Summer 2026

Huddersfield-based musician and artist Thabo Mkwananzi will create UMFECE (Cocoon), a new participatory project at YSP inspired by the Bantutronic philosophy which looks 500 years into the past to honour ancestral wisdom and 500 years into the future to imagine new possibilities.

The new project UMFECE by Zimbabwe-born Thabo will transform a tree within the Park into a place for gathering, performance, and cultural exchange, bringing together multigenerational groups of people. UMFECE draws on the long-standing Bantu tradition of meeting beneath trees to share music, food, and ancestral knowledge. Members of the Bantu diaspora across Yorkshire will be invited to take part in conversations, performances, and moments of reflection, fostering meaningful connections.

These shared experiences will be documented through photography, sound, and text, forming a living archive of diaspora wisdom.

Thabo first collaborated with YSP in 2023, performing with the interactive artwork Light Organ by Akeelah Bertram, Adam Glatherine and Simon Fletcher.

Jakob Rowlinson: ROTATOR
18 July – October 2026 
YSP Centre

ROTATOR is Jakob Rowlinson’s first institutional project, presented as an installation in the YSP Centre and a solo exhibition, REVIVER at The Art House in Wakefield, having developed from a 2024 collaborative residency between both organisations. Spanning across the two venues, this new body of work weaves together complex material histories, explores the ecology of YSP’s landscape, and continues the artist’s interest in queering the archive. Rowlinson merges the sacred and profane, drawing on religious and folkloric imagery such as angels, demons and green men, and combining them with contemporary queer fashion and fetish references.

Suspended above the YSP Centre concourse, ROTATOR features three large-scale leather sculptures that act as guardians of the threshold between indoors and outdoors. Coloured using handmade oak-gall dyes foraged from YSP’s trees, they reference Yorkshire’s historic importance in the leather tanning industry. At the heart of each sculpture is a two-faced head, like modern Janus figures. Created from reclaimed leather garments that are relics of bodily history, the material is revived in both form and meaning. Spiralling out from this central point are wing-like forms whose patterns draw inspiration from orange-tip and comma butterflies that Rowlinson saw at YSP, and whose metamorphic cycles represent themes of self-renewal and transformation.

ROTATOR coincides with Rowlinson’s solo exhibition REVIVER at The Art House on display 18 July – 12 September 2026.

Louise Lockhart: Cake Crumbs and Lemonade
7 March – 28 June 2026
YSP Centre

Cake Crumbs and Lemonade, is the largest solo exhibition to date by illustrator Louise Lockhart.

Working from her studio on a farm in rural Wales, Lockhart primarily creates collage and print-based works using cut paper shapes to form richly coloured, folk-inspired imagery that celebrates the rituals of everyday life.

Inspired by the work of Mass Observation – a social research organisation founded in 1937 set up to study the everyday lives of ordinary people in Britain – Cake Crumbs and Lemonade offers a joyful and nostalgic reflection on the routines and rituals of the time. From seaside strolls and fairground rides, to lemonade labels and nights at the circus, Lockhart captures the charm of British leisure daily life. With a nod to Barbara Jones’s Black Eyes and Lemonade shown at the Festival of Britain in 1951, Louise has sought to convey what makes up popular art today.

As an avid collector and documenter of the disappearing handmade and unique gems, Lockhart draws inspiration from printed fruit tissue, hand-painted shop signs and the everyday things that shape our visual culture.

YSP MADE x Design-Nation Showcase
21 April – 18 October 2026 
YSP Centre

YSP continues its mission to support independent makers with the biannual MADE showcase. In spring 2026, a new collaboration will launch with Design-Nation, the leading membership portfolio for contemporary craft and design in the UK, coinciding with its 25th anniversary.

The work of the following 20 renowned craftspeople will be displayed in YSP’s main visitor centre, and all work will be for sale:

Alma Boyes, Beverley Sommerville, Elizabeth Sinkova, Bekky May, Caroline Brogden, Hannah Heys, Jade Mellor, Jane Bevan, Belgin Bozsahin, Cheyenne Chew Siegel, Hannah Lane, Jean White, Judith Peterhoff, Kate Bajic, Linda Bloomfield, Mary Stephens, Nicki Jarvis, Rachel Stowe, Samantha Robinson, Xinyi Chen.

The selection of artists highlights excellence in ceramics, silversmithing, jewellery and several other disciplines, resulting in a vibrant display of the best in contemporary British craft and design.

Annie Montgomerie: Missies and Nippers 
11 July – 1 November 2026
YSP Centre

Annie Montgomerie returns to YSP in summer 2026, with a new exhibition Missies and Nippers, following her sell-out show Hand Me Downs in 2022. Known for her distinctive hand-crafted characters, Montgomerie’s, three-dimensional animals inhabit a tender space between childhood innocence and adult reflection.

With its nostalgic detail, this exhibition invites visitors into Montgomerie’s world of quiet emotion and vulnerability, reflecting on her own childhood memories. It focusses on the contradictions of sweetness of early wonder and the ache of feeling different – how happiness and sadness always lived side by side, then and now. Making these pieces is a way for Montgomerie to hold both at once; to honour the small, insecure child she was, and to let her speak again through the quiet, handmade worlds she creates.

Each of Montgomerie’s creations – cats, dogs, foxes, elephants and other exotic animals – is meticulously constructed by hand, their bodies made from vintage finds from the 1970s and 1980s, layered with retro patterned fabrics and faux furs. Dressed in tiny frocks or trouser suits, they bear a ‘loved-to-death’ appearance, their postures and eyes quietly telling stories of hope, fragility and belonging.

Angela Harding: A Chronicle of Birds and Beasts
14 November – 28 February 2027 
YSP Centre

After ten years, YSP welcomes acclaimed printmaker and illustrator Angela Harding back with A Chronicle of Birds and Beasts. This exhibition marks a momentous moment in Harding’s career, showcasing her enormous talents as one of the most recognised printmakers and illustrators working in the UK today.

This new exhibition celebrates Harding’s extraordinary ability to capture the vitality and poetry of the natural world through her distinctive printmaking and illustration style, adored by art, nature and book lovers alike. It will feature many new works, including a special triptych of large-scale prints, Entrapped Eagle, Waking Fox and Tapestry of Birds printed by master printmaker, Dan Bugg of Penfold Press in Selby. Many of Harding’s new works are inspired by a recent trip to Fair Isle, where she spent nine weeks as an artist in residence. There will be 24 small oil paintings, along with book illustrations and works created for The Wilding Project with Isabella Tree and Poet Laureate Simon Armitage. Armitage will also respond to the exhibition’s title, with Harding creating an illustration for his accompanying words and producing a limited-edition print.

Nature is a constant source of inspiration and she works from her garden studio which is alive with birds and their song. Deeply connected to the natural world, Harding is acutely aware of the environmental crises facing our planet. The awareness has motivated her to collaborate with conservationists, writers and authors to create new prints that highlight these pressing issues. This show brings all her collaborations together to highlight the breadth of creativity Harding is able to accomplish.

-ENDS-

Notes for Editors
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

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