The Art House (TAH) is delighted to announce its Spring/Summer 2026 programme, a bold season of exhibitions and commissions spanning sculpture, moving image, photography, performance and public art. The season brings together an exciting group of artists whose practices explore embodied knowledge, labour, landscape, queerness and the politics of visibility.
Exhibitions and Projects
The season continues with Divine Archives (until 7 March 2026), the first major solo exhibition by Wakefield-based Emily Ryalls. Developed through collaboration with over 40 women, the exhibition reimagines women’s embodied knowledge as a living archive, using performance, sculpture and photography to honour the body as a site of memory, friendship and creative celebration. The exhibition culminates over International Women’s Day weekend with a full day (on 7 March) of participatory activity, including communal making, workshops and a spoken word open mic, extending the exhibition’s themes through collective gathering and shared creative practice.
The programme also includes Reclaim the Night: Wakefield (27 February–13 March 2026), a community-led exhibition reflecting on Wakefield’s 2025 Reclaim the Night march, foregrounding collective action, solidarity and ongoing work to create safer streets.
From March, TAH welcomes The Royal Society of Sculptors: The 2025 Gilbert Bayes Award Winners (21 March-6 May 2026), celebrating emerging sculptural practices from across the UK and beyond. Presented in Wakefield – a City of Sculpture – the exhibition showcases a dynamic group of early-career artists whose work reflects the breadth and urgency of contemporary sculpture today.
Running concurrently, internationally acclaimed photographer Emily Andersen presents Somewhere Else Entirely (21 March-30 May 2026) in the Tiled Gallery. Andersen’s first moving-image work is a poetic, three-screen installation exploring the life and work of poet Ruth Fainlight. Through image and sound, the work offers a contemplative portrait of creativity, resilience and the intertwining of biography and artistic voice.
Opening the main gallery programme in May, Harriet Bowman: Slow Puncture (16 May-9 July 2026) presents an ambitious installation by the Winner of the Mark Tanner Sculpture Award 2024-25. Using glass, rubber, metal and ceramics, Bowman reshapes industrial materials into precarious, fractured forms that speak to labour, repair and bodily vulnerability, balancing humour with unease.
In summer, TAH reveals Jakob Rowlinson: REVIVER (18 July-12 September 2026), the artist’s first UK institutional solo exhibition. Developed through a collaborative residency with Yorkshire Sculpture Park, the project spans both venues and weaves together material histories, local ecology and queered archival practices. Drawing on religious, folkloric and contemporary queer references, Rowlinson’s work merges the sacred and profane to imagine new relationships between landscape, identity and memory.
Extending beyond the gallery, Ally Rosenberg: Personal Growth (from March 2026 onwards) is a new open-air sculpture for Wakefield. Combining humour with critique, the work interrogates traditions of public sculpture, masculinity and power, offering a timely and provocative reimagining of what public monuments can signify today.
Together, Spring/Summer 2026 reflects TAH’s ongoing commitment to supporting ambitious artistic practice, championing underrepresented voices, and creating spaces where making, thinking and feeling can exist collectively.
Damon Jackson-Waldock, Co-Executive Director at The Art House, says: “At The Art House, we’re proud to champion artists whose work is rooted in lived experience and who challenge how stories are told, remembered and shared. This season brings together powerful personal and collective narratives. From early-career sculptors to internationally recognised artists, these projects reflect the urgency and care that define our programme, and our commitment to making space for diverse voices and ambitious ideas.”
A vibrant programme of free, participatory events
The Rhubarb Lounge (16-22 February 2026) transforms the Tiled Gallery into a playful, colourful space inspired by Wakefield’s most iconic crop, offering drop-in activities and creative exploration in a welcoming, relaxed environment. Across the Easter holidays, Easter at The Art House (30 March-11 April 2026) returns with two joyful weeks of family-friendly creativity, encouraging imagination, making and shared experiences.
In May, don’t miss the return of our beloved CRAFTED Makers Market (9 May 2026) and Open Studios (9 May 2026), celebrating the city’s thriving creative community, opening up TAH’s historic Grade II listed former Carnegie Library and studios to showcase hand-crafted work by local designer-makers and offer behind-the-scenes access to artists’ working spaces.
The late May half-term welcomes The Doodle Lounge (25-30 May 2026), a vibrant drop-in space for all ages focused on playful mark-making and creative freedom. The summer programme culminates with Refugee Week Celebration Day 2025 (20 June 2026) and PRINTED (11 July 2026), a lively market bringing together contemporary artists and designers working across paper-based disciplines.
Together, these events extend the themes of the exhibition programme into hands-on experiences that prioritise accessibility, joy and participation.
Residency Programme
Our Programme continues to support and welcome exciting artists through its Residency Programme that brings urgent, deeply personal perspectives to the programme, each creating space for stories that need to be seen and heard.
Terence Birch continues his residency into early 2026, using ceramics for the first time to explore themes of disability, prosthetics and the body. Looking ahead, TAH will also support the development of Cripping Breath, a major collaborative project by artists Rachel Gadsden, Christopher Samuel and Liberty Bligh. Beginning as a research project in 2026, Cripping Breath emerges from a long-term partnership with the Wellcome Trust and the University of Sheffield, bringing together artists with lived experience of respiratory illness and mechanical ventilation.
Further exhibition details:
Emily Ryalls: Divine Archives
Unitl 7 March 2026, Main Gallery
Wakefield-born artist Emily Ryalls presents a major solo exhibition reimagining the body as a living archive. Through performance, sculpture, and photography, Divine Archives celebrates women’s bodies as vessels of knowledge and resilience. Developed through collaboration with over 40 women, the exhibition reimagines women’s embodied knowledge as a living archive, using performance, sculpture and photography to honour the body as a site of memory, friendship and creative celebration.
More information
Reclaim the Night: Wakefield – Exhibition celebrating the 2025 Reclaim the Night March
27 February–13 March 2026, Tiled Gallery
Relive Wakefield’s historic 2025 Reclaim the Night march through an exhibition that celebrates collective action, solidarity and the ongoing fight for safer streets. The Tiled Gallery will be transformed using film footage, handmade banners created by participants, and sound. This exhibition honours both the energy of the night itself and its lasting legacy, and offers opportunities to learn more about how to support work to end violence against women and girls. Together, these materials tell a story of community-led resistance, care and hope, grounded in local voices and lived experience. This exhibition sits within the wider Spring/Summer 2026 programme, foregrounding collective making, civic action and the power of creative expression as tools for social change.
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The Royal Society of Sculptors: The 2025 Gilbert Bayes Award Winners
21 March-6 May 2026, Main Gallery
Wakefield’s renowned status as a City of Sculpture makes it the ideal home for this exciting project with the Royal Society of Sculptors, welcoming the Gilbert Bayes Award 2025 Winners Exhibition to the city. This celebration of emerging artistic talent presents a dynamic and thought-provoking collection of works, offering audiences a glimpse into some of the most compelling sculptural practices shaping the field today, including Amanda Cornish, Beverley Duckworth, Bo-Yi Wu, Emmanuel Awuni, Javier Carro Temboury, Lucy Mulholland, Madeleine Ruggi, Regan Boyce, Salvatore Pione, Stephen Burke, and Yidan Kim. The Gilbert Bayes Award, presented annually by the Royal Society of Sculptors, supports early-career artists and plays a vital role in cultivating the next generation of leading voices in contemporary sculpture.
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Emily Andersen: Somewhere Else Entirely
21 March-30 May 2026, Tiled Gallery
Internationally-acclaimed photographer Emily Andersen presents Somewhere Else Entirely, a three-screen video installation exploring the life and work of American-born poet Ruth Fainlight (b.1931). Known for her intensely visual writing on memory, domestic life and psychological experience, Fainlight has been a distinctive voice in British and American poetry for over six decades. Andersen’s poetic film, her first moving-image work, translates Fainlight’s words and lived experiences into still and moving images of the domestic, the natural world, and the written page.
Harriet Bowman: Slow Puncture
16 May-9 July 2026, Main Gallery
Opening our 2026 summer season, The Art House presents the Winner of the Mark Tanner Sculpture Award 2024-25, Harriet Bowman, with the exhibition Slow Puncture, an ambitious installation exploring the entanglement of body, vehicle and material. In this new work, Bowman explores language, industry and secondary use of materials through a range of media, including glass, metal, rubber and ceramics. Bowman reshapes everyday industrial matter into fragile, fractured forms that speak of labour, repair and vulnerability. Glass headrests slump, tyres collapse, and welded supports cradle precarious fragments, objects balanced between humour and unease.
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Jakob Rowlinson: REVIVER
18 July-12 September 2026, Main Gallery
REVIVER is Jakob Rowlinson’s first UK institutional project, presented as a solo exhibition at The Art House in Wakefield, and an installation, ROTATOR, in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park Centre, having developed from a 2024 collaborative residency between both organisations. Spanning across the two venues, this new body of work weaves together complex material histories, explores the ecology of the local landscape, and continues the artist’s interest in queering the archive. Rowlinson merges the sacred and profane, drawing on religious and folkloric imagery such as angels, demons and green men, and combining them with contemporary queer fashion and fetish references. Both projects open on Saturday 18 July.
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Ally Rosenberg: Personal Growth – a new sculpture for the open air
March 2026 – onwards
Personal Growth is a new outdoor sculpture by Ally Rosenberg that plays with contradiction: softness and armour, fragility and threat. Upholstered bubblewrap is cast into solid, defensive forms, while sprung doorstoppers jut out like detonators, part protection, part provocation. Drawing ironic inspiration from the Venus of Willendorf, the pocket-sized prehistoric fertility figure, Rosenberg’s sculpture reworks voluptuous, non-phallic forms to question the long association of public sculpture with masculinity, power and ego. Balancing humour with critique, Personal Growth offers a timely reimagining of what monuments and masculinity can signify in public space.
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