Rise is an ambitious first solo museum exhibition by LR Vandy, created for The Weston Gallery with many works made on site at YSP.

Vandy has transformed the gallery into an immersive environment dominated by a soaring rope maypole. The twisting structure draws on the idea of the maypole as a site of communal gathering, ritual, and collective movement. Using the form and texture of rope, Vandy's work explores the textile industry’s role in Britain’s industrial history, and ongoing examination of labour, pattern, and material legacy.

Standing five metres high outside The Weston, Dancing in time: the ties that bind us was commissioned by National Museums Liverpool for the International Slavery Museum’s Martin Luther King Pop Up series. First displayed on the Liverpool Waterfront it will now overlook the Park's historic landscape.

It is an honour to show my work at YSP. This opportunity to create a site-specific installation is a first for me, offering space to expand the scope of my work and ideas to mount a complex, sensory experience rooted in materiality.

My practice centres the hidden human costs of colonialism, transportation systems and commodities, and the knotted histories of trade and power they contain. The title, Rise, references ideas of resilience, protest, liberation and collective joy explored through rituals and dance.

(LR Vandy)