Six Years in Halifax: A Short History of the Henry Moore Studio, Dean Clough from 1986 to 1992.

Looking back now over the course of my PhD study, which feels like it has been a very long journey, it appears to me as a series of revolutions: that is, transformations in my way of thinking (hard now to contemplate that I have come out the other end of them) which completely changed my view, not just of my subject - the Henry Moore Studio at Dean Clough - but the art world within which I was working, and the way I wanted to write about it. When I embarked on the study in 2016, I was working as a collections curator at Leeds Art Gallery, based at the Henry Moore Institute. As the Institute is affiliated to the Henry Moore Foundation, which is the parent body of the Henry Moore Studio, I was – in theory - an insider to the project. In reality, the Studio had closed many years before I arrived on the scene, and I had never met Robert Hopper or any of the core group of people who worked there, so I came with little prior or special knowledge of the organisation. However, that is not to say that I came to the project empty-handed. Quite the opposite. As I see now (but only in retrospect), I was carrying around in my head an encompassing view of the art world, which permeated my professional practice. This did not relate to my work at the Institute or Leeds Art Gallery specifically, but a career spent working in and around institutions: from my art historical training (undertaken in a traditional university department), through several years of curatorial practice, latterly within the framework of a municipal gallery and specialist centre for the study of sculpture. Essentially, my job at the time was to categorise, evaluate and document works of art; then place them within the established canon of art history by displaying them in thematic, chronological or genre-based configurations; and, initially, I intended to explore the Henry Moore Studio in exactly this way. I wanted to define what it was, then compare it with other similar art organisations and situate it within a particular segment of art history, so that it could be better understood within my art world; and possibly used to inform future practice. It was not that I felt this method would be best particularly, but that I didn’t really know any other way. From reading around the subject, I knew that the Henry Moore Studio had been a making and exhibition project, which generated a series of large-scale projects, in which the site was often a key element. Whilst the Studio had been funded by the Henry Moore Foundation, I understood that it had been run on the ground by a group of artists, based at Dean Clough, Halifax, under the leadership of Paul Bradley, who had been highly instrumental in the first project by Giuseppe Penone and subsequently managed most aspects of its programme. As a project operated by artists for other artists, under the auspices of an institution, I attempted to sketch a lineage for the Studio amongst artist-led initiatives, as they had evolved in the post-war period, specifically from the 1960s to the 1980s.

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