University of Cumbria academic’s drawings acquired by the Henry Moore Institute

The Henry Moore Institute at Leeds has acquired a series of drawings by the University of Cumbria’s Professor of Fine Art, Robert Williams as part of an archive documenting American artist Mark Dion’s Tasting Garden project (1998) at the Storey Gallery in Lancaster.

Part of a major collaborative project, the drawings were made as designs for 21 oversized bronze representations of various fruit types made by Williams for the installation in the hidden gardens of The Storey Institute that explored issues of diversity, ecology and global agribusiness.

The project was a major part of the ArtransPennine98 event curated by the late Robert Hopper of The Henry Moore Sculpture Trust and Director of Tate Liverpool Lewis Biggs. The archive, which has already been exhibited in the UK, the Netherlands, and New York, was collected by former Storey Gallery Director Dr. John Angus and is made up of drawings by Dion and Williams with documentary photographs by Don Burnett.

The archive will be permanently held at the Henry Moore Institute at Leeds, where Williams was a post-graduate Henry Moore Scholar in the 1990’s. Tragically the Tasting Garden was destroyed by vandals and metal thieves in 2008.