A Maypole for Our Times: LR Vandy’s Rise
At the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, where monumental forms punctuate rolling parkland, LR Vandy presents Rise—her first solo museum exhibition and an ambitious new chapter in a practice defined by material inquiry and historical reckoning. Installed in and around The Weston Gallery, the exhibition unwinds through rope: twisted, knotted, bound and released, the humble material becoming both medium and message.
LR Vandy, Dancing in Time: The Ties That Bind Us Maquette, 2024.
Sisal and Manilla rope, wood, metal and willow.
At the centre of the gallery stands a soaring rope maypole, transforming the space into an immersive sculptural environment. Five metres high, the structure spirals upward with dynamic tension, its strands suggesting movement even in stillness. Drawing on the communal ritual of the maypole dance, the sculpture references traditions of seasonal renewal and collective celebration while hinting at deeper cultural entanglements. “I do like the idea of making a sculpture that has the ability, like the maypole, to make people dance around it,” Vandy explains. “Carnival is also about rebellion, it is a call to arms.”
LR Vandy creating "Dancing in Time: The Ties That Bind Us". Photo: India Hobson
For Vandy, rope is never neutral. Its fibres carry the memory of maritime labour, global trade routes and the machinery of empire. The artist’s recent relocation to a studio at the historic ropery of Chatham Historic Dockyard in London profoundly shaped this body of work. Rope has been produced at the dockyard since the seventeenth century, binding the material to Britain’s naval and mercantile histories. Watching master ropemakers twist hemp fibres on Victorian machinery deepened Vandy’s fascination with rope’s ambivalent properties—its capacity to bind, suspend and secure, but also to restrain.
L R Vandy, Twist,2024. Exhibition View at October Gallery, 2024. Courtesy the artist and October Gallery, London. Photo © Jonathan Greet. Courtesy Yorkshire Sculpture Park
Throughout Rise, rope becomes both sculptural material and historical archive. Two towering forms reminiscent of spinning tops stretch towards the gallery ceiling, their shapes derived from wooden spindles used in textile production. Partially wrapped in rope and weighted with “pudding” (discarded rope traditionally used in maritime repair) the structures appear poised in precarious balance, embodying rhythm and motion.
Elsewhere, twisted rope figures suggest dancing female bodies. These works continue Vandy’s exploration of the underrepresented abstract female form while referencing the histories embedded in the material itself. Details such as bindings and cuffs evoke the violence of the transatlantic slave trade, yet the figures remain animated by a sense of resilience and release.
L R Vandy, Spinning a Yarn, 2025. Courtesy the Artist and October Gallery. Photo © L R Vandy. Courtesy Yorkshire Sculpture Park
Wall-based works extend these ideas through circular mandala-like compositions assembled from weaving loom shuttles, coloured threads and found objects including ship wheels and barrel rings. A deliberate colour palette further enriches the installation: green for land and harvest, pale blue and yellow for sky and sun, red for blood, gold for extractive industries, and deep indigo recalling the dye whose global trade relied on exploited land and labour.
Outside The Weston Gallery, the monumental sculpture Dancing in Time: The Ties That Bind Us, originally commissioned by National Museums Liverpool for the International Slavery Museum, overlooks the park’s landscape. Its twisting rope form suggests a dancing body—an homage to the resilience of Black women and the role of dance as both ritual and resistance across the African diaspora.
LR Vandy, Dancing in Time: Vogue, 2024. Sisal rope, wood and metal.
Throughout Rise, Vandy positions rope as a textile with memory. Manipulated, sewn and bound by hand, it carries the weight of industrial histories while gesturing toward collective movement and liberation. As visitors circle the central maypole, the sculpture subtly invites participation, echoing the communal choreography that inspired it. The result is a powerful meditation on labour, materiality and the enduring human impulse to gather, protest and celebrate together.
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Further Information:
LR Vandy: Rise is on show at The Weston Gallery (Outdoors) at Yorkshire Sculpture Park from –
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Image Credits:
Lead: LR Vandy, Twist, 2024. Edition of 8 plus 1 artist's proof, Giclée print on Hahnemühle pearl paper.
All further images as credited in captions.