Hold to This Earth: Land as Collaborator at Yorkshire Sculpture Park
Woad grown in Yorkshire soil. Wool sheared from a flock in Arizona. Earth carried across an ocean from Teejop, Wisconsin. These are the raw materials gathered at Yorkshire Sculpture Park this autumn, where a landmark exhibition asks British audiences to consider the land as collaborator.
Hold to This Earth: Works by Contemporary Indigenous North American Artists from Tia Collection brings together 65 works by 38 artists spanning over 35 Tribal Nations. It's the first group show staged in Yorkshire Sculpture Park's (YSP) Underground Gallery in its twenty-year history, and for textile lovers, it offers a masterclass in how fibre, hide, wool and natural dye carry the legacy of land across generations.
Dakota Mace: Kéyah Yinílniih (The Land Remembers). Photo courtesy of YSP.
Dakota Mace's new commission, Kéyah Yinílniih (The Land Remembers), greets visitors with an entire wall of earthen abstraction. Grown from a cyanotype made on site, the piece uses woad, weld and madder root alongside wool and clay sourced from both the UK and Mace's home community, layering British and Diné materials into a single surface.
Teresa Baker, Infinite, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and de boer Los Angeles, California. Photo © Jacob Phillip, courtesy YSP
Weaving runs through the show's spine. Tyrrell Tapaha, a sixth-generation Navajo weaver and shepherd, works with wool from the flock he tends, dyed using plants he grows or forages himself. His pieces fold traditional technique around contemporary narratives of queerness, making the loom a place for reinvention as much as continuity. Melissa Cody, working in the Diné textile tradition of her family, brings a similar rigour to her weaving, translating inherited pattern language into work that feels wholly of the present. Teresa Baker takes a different route into landscape, combining astroturf with buckskin, bark and yarn to build abstracted terrains that hold both the vast and the intricate in view.
Jeffrey Gibson, TO MY NATION, 2017. Image courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects Culver City, CA. Photo © The Artist and Roberts Projects Culver City, CA, courtesy YSP
Beadwork and regalia find bold new company in Jeffrey Gibson's TO MY NATION, where jingles, fringing and pop lyrics collide, nodding to queer nightlife alongside ceremonial dress. Elsewhere, Nicholas Galanin paints a star map onto deer hide in tribute to ancestors held in institutional collections, and Rose B. Simpson's ceramic figure grips a piece of unfired clay, a gesture toward the matrilineal knowledge passed down through her family and community at Santa Clara Pueblo. Her mother, Roxanne Swentzell, also appears in the show, extending that lineage across two generations under one roof.
Cara Romero, Naomi, 2017. © Cara Romero. Tia Collection. Image courtesy of Cara Romero Gallery, Santa Fe, NM.
Cara Romero's photographic doll box portraits push against flattened ideas of Native identity, dressing individual named women in distinct regalia drawn from their own bioregions. Raven Chacon's film Three Songs follows three generations of women singing and drumming at sites of historic trauma, reclaiming ground through voice and rhythm rather than cloth alone.
Beyond the gallery walls, six outdoor commissions extend the conversation into YSP's 500 acres of parkland. Raven Halfmoon's monumental The Guardians and Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds's circular Bear's Tipi, honouring eight Tribal Nations, both insist on Indigenous presence within a landscape shaped by centuries of English use and history.
Hold to This Earth, 2026. Courtesy of Tia Collection. Photo © India Hobson, courtesy YSP
Curated with Tia Collection, whose founder's dedication to Indigenous practice spans nearly two decades, this exhibition resists any single story of what Native art looks like today. A fully illustrated catalogue, featuring new essays from artist Rose B. Simpson, accompanies the show. For anyone who believes cloth and craft carry politics as much as beauty, this is a journey north worth making.
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Further Information:
Hold to This Earth: Works by Contemporary Indigenous North American Artists from Tia Collection is on now at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield WF4 4LG, UK until 18 April 2027.
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Image Credits:
Lead:
Foreground: Marie Watt, Skywalker/Skyscraper (Twins) Flint & Sapling, 2020. © Marie Watt. Tia Collection. Image courtesy of Marie Watt Studio and MARC STRAUS, New York.
Background: Cannupa Hanska Luger, Sweet Land: Coyote 2, 2020. Tia Collection, Santa Fe, NM. Photo © James Hart Photography.
All further images as credited in captions.