Curating as Pedagogy (FULL-DAY PART 2)
Papers are invited to explore curating as a symbiotic coproduction of research and discursive convenings with knowledge sharing outputs that include exhibitions, Researcher and Artist Residencies, Public Events, and Academic Partnerships, Affiliated Teaching posts, and more, with a focus on Henry Moore and the curatorial and research strategies of the Henry Moore Studios & Gardens.
Since its founding by Moore in 1977, the Henry Moore Foundation has placed research at the heart of its curatorial practice and exhibitions programme with the largest Archival holdings on Moore being open to all. The panel highlights the research-led exhibitions of HMF to disseminate new knowledge on Moore; and the new HMS&G Post Doctoral Researcher becoming an Affiliated Lecturer at the University of Cambridge.
We aim to critically reflect on the theoretical and methodological frameworks through which research, expanded learning, and the display and exhibitions on Moore’s work are conceived and received. This is to challenge centre-periphery models in Art History and exhibition histories and share scholarship and new frameworks to understand Moore’s work and its dissemination in a transhistorical and transnational context. Curating as Pedagogy in relation to Moore may serve as a place to rethink the geography of British art and the global dialogues that Moore’s work exists in.
Papers examine specific exhibitions or positions on research methodologies related to Moore, and how curatorial practice itself can function as a form of research and pedagogy.
Session Convenors:
Laura Barlow, Henry Moore Studios & Gardens, Henry Moore Foundation
Laura Bruni, Henry Moore Studios & Gardens, Henry Moore Foundation
Alexander Marr, Department of Art History, University of Cambridge
Speakers:
Samet Mor, Postdoctoral Researcher at Henry Moore Foundation & Affiliated Lecturer at the University of Cambridge
Iconoclasm in the Archive: Curating Grey Literature beyond `the Master` Narrative
This paper examines the entangled relationship between curatorial practice, research, and pedagogy through the figure of Henry Moore. It explores how postdoctoral research can operate as a dialogical and iconoclastic process—challenging the solidity of the “master” narrative that continues to shape both Moore’s legacy and broader constructions of artistic genius within British art history. It proposes that academic inquiry can function as a curatorial act: an active reassembly of neglected materials that loosens the grip of received readings and opens new directions for art-historical investigation.
Drawing on overlooked forms of “grey literature” beyond the artist’s official archive—often mobilised to sustain his image as a solitary “master”—the study foregrounds peripheral materials produced by collaborators and interlocutors, including letters, technical diagrams, and board minutes. Adopting curating-as-research as a methodology, it collates non-authored archival fragments to expose and reconfigure constructions of artists’ narratives. These traces underpin a curatorial iconoclasm that reframes artistic production as a distributed assemblage, challenging the exaltation of singular authorship in curatorial and academic discourse.
Rather than reiterating Moore’s positioning as Socialist, Constructivist, War Artist, Surrealist, or Iconographer—framings that reproduce his image as a “master” among his peers while obscuring the peripheral actors who enabled his practice—this project introduces a methodological innovation for curatorial and research inquiry. Extending beyond Moore scholarship, it speaks to wider debates in art history and curatorial practice about authorship, collaboration, and the archive. Developed within the Henry Moore Studios & Gardens’ research-led model, in collaboration with the University of Cambridge, it advances curating-as-research as a pedagogical practice—one that engages researchers, archivists, and students in the collective dismantling and reassembling of artistic narratives.
Hyunji Cho, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA)
The Tactility of Meaning-Making: Revisiting Herbert Read’s Material–Meaning Dualism
This paper reconsiders Herbert Read’s theory of tactility to expand the understanding of how touch operates in the aesthetic experience of sculpture. Read’s emphasis on touch has often been reduced to the assumption that he advocated literal contact, yet this study refutes such simplification. First, it argues that physical touch, when allowed by environmental conditions, is not a limitation but an essential mode of tactile appreciation in sculpture. Second, his writing implies a visual form of tactile experience—a way of “seeing as touching”—emerging through the viewer’s imaginative response to the material processes of sculptural formation.
However, Read consistently excludes what may be called the “tactility of meaning,” the associative or symbolic touch that emerges from the recognition of figure and the associative thoughts it provokes, privileging the material process while suppressing meaning-making. This tension becomes evident in his criticism of Henry Moore’s sculptures, especially those where abstraction and figuration intertwine, leaving half of sculpture’s tactile potential unexplored. While Read’s focus on material process is significant for reinstating the bodily dimension of sculptural making and viewing, this paper contends that the perception of figures and the associative responses they stimulate are not merely a reductive process of filtering semantic content, but an exercise in tactile immersion. By reconsidering this gap, the study proposes sculptural viewing as a form of pedagogy—a dynamic process of sensory negotiation, resonating with the Henry Moore Institute’s 2023 program Reassessing Herbert Read and contributing to global discourses on sculpture and sensory pedagogy.
Chris Owen, Anglia Ruskin University
The Coalmining Drawings – Curating Moore to Reach New Audiences
‘I was deeply lost in my own thoughts at times, as a St Albans Boy who spent twenty-five years in underground coal mining.’ Visitor, St Albans, 19 January 2023
Opening in late 2022, ‘Henry Moore: Drawing in the Dark’ was the first comprehensive exhibition of the coalmining drawings which the sculptor made as a war artist in 1942. In addition to preparatory and final drawings, it included press photographs of Moore sketching the miners underground. Compared to other curated exhibitions of the artist’s work, this had the potential to challenge disciplinary boundaries, and to reach a different demographic, particularly male, working-class audiences. Art about coalmining, made by miners, still thrives in the coalfields of Northern Britain and South Wales. In many former colliery towns, elderly ex-miners reminisce about their previous roles underground, forming close-knit communities, both face-to-face and online. The venues chosen for this exhibition serve geographically contrasting communities, but both are recent recipients of significant support from Arts Council England. In leafy St Albans, over eighty miles from any former coalmine, many visitors to the exhibition still described family ties to an industry which at its height employed 1.2 million British workers. In Doncaster, the Danum Gallery lies in the Yorkshire coalfield, less than twenty miles from Wheldale Colliery in Castleford, where Moore’s father worked and his son drew. Utilising the testimony and responses of gallery visitors, this paper will attempt to evaluate the success of the exhibition in engaging new audiences and stimulating further inter-disciplinary research.
Emily Gray,Post Doctoral Researcher, Henry Moore Institute
Research-In-Progress and Curatorial Pedagogy: Tracing Moore’s Exhibition History at Heny Moore Studios & Gardens
This paper explores how research-in-progress operates as a form of curatorial pedagogy within research-led institutions. Taking recent work on Henry Moore’s exhibition history at Henry Moore Studios & Gardens as a case study, it reflects on how early enquiry across catalogues, touring data, press responses and contextual studies begins to shape the interpretive groundwork for a more cohesive account of Moore’s display history. As part of the initial research phase for the forthcoming redevelopment, this work highlights how preliminary connections, emerging questions and partial narratives contribute to the early formation and direction of curatorial insight.
Building on my PhD research into curating as shared knowledge production, the paper approaches this early research as a pedagogical space within the institution – a stage in which understanding develops incrementally, through the slow accumulation of connections made through the interplay of sources, institutional contexts and research orientations. It also considers how research-in-progress circulates through internal and public-facing discursive activities, contributing to the broader interpretive culture even when it does not lead directly to exhibition content. The paper argues that such preliminary work plays a generative role in shaping the questions, emphases and interpretative bearings on which future displays and programming can build.