“I expected sculpture. What I got instead was a complete recalibration of attention.”
Until Jan 31, 2027.
OUR VERDICT
Kew Gardens
I spend an alarming amount of my life staring at screens. My iPhone tells me how many steps I have taken while simultaneously ensuring I never properly experience any of them. My laptop glows accusingly from dawn until some morally questionable hour after midnight. I occasionally go to the cinema, mostly because it feels romantic to sit in the dark with strangers while collectively ignoring one another.
To become the sort of woman who occasionally touches clay instead of keyboards, I recently booked myself into a ceramics class. Seeking spiritual growth and perhaps a slightly asymmetrical bowl, I pushed open the studio door only to discover an entirely naked man standing on a platform.
Kew Gardens
Which is how I found myself, a woman whose artistic confidence peaked with a potato print in primary school, attempting to sculpt the human form while trying not to make eye contact with a stranger holding a pose under fluorescent lighting.
The pieces I have made since are objectively terrible in the conventional sense. Limbs drift into abstraction. Heads become existential. Nothing resembles the model. Yet they surprised me because they contained something recognisably human.
Kew Gardens
For years, travelling through Canada, I became obsessed with soapstone carvings created by First Nations artists: dancing bears, soaring eagles, creatures somehow both grounded and spiritual at once. They carried the landscape inside them. The curves looked wind-worn. Even the polished surfaces felt geological rather than decorative.
Which is precisely why Henry Moore belongs at Kew. The new exhibition, Henry Moore: Monumental Nature, running until 31 January 2027, is extraordinary not simply because of the scale – there are 30 monumental sculptures spread across the gardens and more than 90 works inside the Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art. But because Moore finally appears where he was always meant to be – outdoors, among trees, weather, shadows and sky.
Henry Moore (1898–1986) famously believed that sculpture was “an art of the open air”. At Kew, you suddenly understand why.
Inside museums, sculpture can feel slightly apologetic, like furniture waiting to be dusted. At Kew, Moore’s work becomes alive. The bronzes rise from the landscape like ancient creatures that wandered in from another geological era and decided to stay.
Sarah Tucker
You are tempted to march purposefully between sculptures, ticking them off the map Kew helpfully provides. They have produced an excellent guide, although frankly, many of the sculptures are roughly the size of modest housing developments and not especially difficult to locate.
But the real joy comes from slowing down.
The curators have placed the works with remarkable intelligence. Some emerge unexpectedly through narrow pathways between trees. Others appear beside lakes where reflections fracture their forms. One moment you are looking at a sculpture; the next you are looking through it at branches, clouds and people beyond.
Moore was obsessed with perspective and with the relationship between inner and outer forms. Suddenly, nature itself becomes part of the sculpture.
You start noticing trees differently, too.
Sarah Tucker
I was fascinated to learn in the accompanying Shirley Sherwood exhibition that when Moore travelled through Italy, he longed for English trees, for thick trunks, twisting branches and dense canopies rather than the slimmer Mediterranean horizons. One of the great sculptors of the twentieth century was, fundamentally, a man who adored trees and his mother. Frankly, what more could one reasonably ask from another human being?
His recurring Mother and Child sculptures suddenly make complete sense at Kew. While I was there, two geese shepherded more than twenty goslings across the grass with the kind of militant maternal vigilance usually associated with elite security teams.
Against this backdrop, Moore’s sculptures about protection, shelter and nurture felt less abstract and more biological.
The trees themselves begin to resemble bodies. Or perhaps bodies resemble trees.
Sarah Tucker
Kew recently hosted an exhibition exploring arboreal thinking, the idea that trees mirror human systems and structures. Walking through Moore’s work, you begin wondering whether all art is simply humans repeatedly rediscovering nature and then pretending it was our own idea.
That is what surprised me most about this exhibition.
I expected sculpture. What I got instead was a complete recalibration of attention.
Screens flatten the world. Everything arrives at an identical scale: wars, shopping, texts, headlines, memes. Kew reverses that damage. Moore’s sculptures force you to move physically around them to understand them. Trees interrupt your view. Light changes the shapes every few minutes. Wind participates.
You cannot consume this exhibition passively. And perhaps that is why it feels oddly restorative.
If you have ever considered visiting Kew Gardens, now is the moment. Don’t postpone it until “things calm down”, because they never do. There is always another email, another meeting, another reason to remain indoors staring at rectangles.
Go instead and walk among enormous bronzes and ancient trees.
And allow yourself the increasingly rare luxury of looking at something slowly.
For more information contact kew.org. Exhibition runs from May 9-January 31, 2027
