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...

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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.