For me, everything in the world of form is understood through our own bodies. From our mother’s breast, from our bones, from bumping into things, we learn what is rough and what is smooth. To observe, to understand, to experience the vast variety of space, shape and form in the world, twenty lifetimes would not be enough. . . Henry Moore 1978.

Henry Moore ceaselessly investigated form, material and volume. He collected objects such as bones, stones and shells which he would turn over in his hands, build up, press into clay, cast, or photograph. Through this haptic practice Moore humanised such forms; their relationship to the body became both physical and imaginative.

In the 1930s, Moore explored the process of metamorphosis from natural object to figure in a series of drawings, several of which he cut up and reconstructed, reimagining the forms within. He adopted a similar process in the 1970s when making a number of photo-collages. Moore photographed flints in the studio before incorporating fragments of these images as torsos and heads in his collages.

Moore ordered and re-ordered the world of objects around him, adding, subtracting and assembling. His profound understanding of the relationship between this world of form and our own bodies can be seen clearly in his multi-part figures in which the sculpted body ceases to be self-contained. Moore composed figures of two or more parts and the negative spaces between them. He treated space as a tangible material,as important as the plaster or bronze mass. In breaking down the boundaries of the human form he united body and environment in an indivisible whole.

From handling a shard of bone to its transformation into a fractured figure, Moore moves between a tactile material experience and a poetic image of the body. His work employs a powerful combination of familiarity and strangeness, often provoking the recognition of what is, or was, and what is depicted.