We are delighted to celebrate the work of OOC DTP Rafael Pérez Evans (The Queen's College, University of Oxford). Rafael's new installation, Horizontals, features in a new sculptural commission as part of Henry Moore and More, a major year-long exhibition at Wakehurst, Kew Gardens, presented in partnership with the Henry Moore Foundation.
Horizontals is a series of participatory wooden sculptures created from fallen ash trees within the Wakehurst landscape. Carved on site by Wakehurst’s arboretum team, the sculptures emerge from the trunks through the lightest of cuts, pared back to what is necessary for rest.
Inspired by Henry Moores' iconic reclining figures, Each sculpture is shaped as a horizontal platform, slightly slanted to cradle a single body. Bed, plinth and bench at once, the works speak to Henry Moore’s reclining figures while asking what kind of pose we can hold today. In Horizontals, the contemporary body cannot recline: it is burnt out, sick and exhausted. This is not an elegant reclining figure, but a contemporary body that cannot hold the pose – flat out, lying down.
The work begins with the body’s wisdom that it needs to stop. In a world where public space makes rest suspicious, Horizontals offers a clear invitation: to lie down horizontally, like a fallen tree, look up, and be held by the forest. The work asking what it means to pause in a world where rest is often difficult to find.
Installed in the near extinct Nothofagus / southern beech collection at Wakehurst. Curated by Laurence Sillars. Specially commissioned by Wakehurst in partnership with the Henry Moore Foundation. Rafael Pérez Evans is also featured in the Henry Moore: Monumental Nature catalogue.
Pérez Evans works with sculpture, installation, and sound to think from and with fractured communities. His practice explores breakdown as both a lived condition and a potential site of liberation, shaped by queer, rural, and disabled life. The materials he works with are often unstable, mirroring the degraded lands, voices, and bodies that have been devalued and rendered surplus.
Henry Moore and More opens at Wakehurst on 5 June 2026 and runs until 23 May 2027.
The OOC DTP Team is incredibly proud to see Rafael's doctoral research and artistic practice recognised through this prestigious commission. We warmly congratulate him on this wonderful achievement and look forward to following the exhibition over the coming year.
Find out more about the exhibition here
