An art gallery featuring several sculptures made from natural materials, displayed on white plinths. The walls are adorned with framed photographs, and the wooden floor adds warmth to the minimalist space, illuminated by natural light.
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LR Vandy: Rise

From 14 March 2026 The Weston Gallery, The Weston, Outdoors

About LR Vandy: Rise

Rise is an ambitious first solo museum exhibition by LR Vandy, created for The Weston Gallery. 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. 

The significant use of rope seen in this exhibition developed when Vandy relocated 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.

Outside you will see Dancing in Time: The Ties That Bind Us (2023), standing at five metres high this sculpture continues Vandy’s exploration of dance as a form of free 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 the Park's historic landscape.

A woman with long, grey hair stands in front of a large woven sculpture resembling a broom. She wears an orange top and navy vest, with a cobbled waterfront and historic buildings in the background under a cloudy sky.

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.

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LR Vandy

LR Vandy at YSP is supported by October Gallery.

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