The Harewood Biennial strives to offer new perspectives on the interiors, collections, and landscapes of the grand country house near Leeds where it takes place – asking contemporary makers, artists and designers to unpick its history and its relationship with visitors.
For its third edition, curator Ligaya Salazar chose to explore the power of craft to bring people together, affect social change and facilitate community connections. Work by 16 practitioners and collectives are nestled among its opulent interiors and across the landscape. Some of these look inwards, at the colonial connections of the house, which was built using wealth from the slave trade, while others use the space as a stage to imagine different ways of interacting and connecting.
Work by major names such as Hew Locke, who is showing an embellished Parian bust of Princess Alexandra of Denmark – part of his Souvenir series that adorns and subverts representations of royal figures – sit alongside emerging makers such as Rosa Harradine, who has created a display of her handmade brushes, and the works of Common Threads, an embroidery collective spanning between the UK and Pakistan brought together by textile artist Alice Kettle.
Furniture designer Kusheda Mensah’s installation of seating is designed to allow people to sit, linger and read indoors, while Venezuelan artist Lucia Pizzani has erected fallen tree branches and ceramic sculptures in the garden, where they will slowly be embraced by live plants. Rebecca Chesney, has made an outdoor installation of windsocks out of abandoned tents salvaged from music festivals, while inside the building Temitayo Ogunbiyi has installed a climbing-frame-esque installation made of manila rope and steel whose sinuous form has multiple references, from flight routes to botanical forms.
Here are 10 artists whose work caught our eye: