Gathering Landscapes, Heavy Water Collective at Weston Park Museum

Photo © Jules Lister

For 150 years, Weston Park Museum has reflected how people have gathered and treasured aspects of the world around them. This new exhibition, curated by the Heavy Water Collective (artists Maud Haya-Baviera, Victoria Lucas, and Joanna Whittle), examines the curious, beautiful, macabre, and magical connections people have made to the land through over 400 objects from Sheffield’s eclectic museum collections. Since prehistory, humans have sought to make sense of the natural world through art, ritual, and the act of collecting. Agricultural, scientific, industrial, and economic shifts across the Global North have transformed humans’ engagement with the land. Nature and culture have become opposing forces in the pursuit of progress. What was once deemed sacred is now, to many, a lucrative natural resource. Yet, humans’ spiritual connection to the landscape endures. As humans became ‘removed’ from nature, representations of the natural world and the romanticized landscape grew. Natural landscapes were celebrated by artisans, reducing the wild to the decorative, perhaps as a form of remembrance for what has been mapped, conquered, and destroyed elsewhere. Gathering Landscapes presents items found in Sheffield’s Natural Science, Archaeology, Social History, Metalwork, and Industry and Art collections. Rather than presenting objects by category or date, Heavy Water Collective has selected items to make visual and conceptual connections. These resist the idea of nature as static and separate; instead highlighting its entanglement with ritual and meaning, exploitation and loss, hope and resilience. Heavy Water Collective’s artworks also appear as markers across the displays, creating prompts to invite visitors to see objects and historical narratives in new ways. As we face climate crisis, the need to reconsider landscapes becomes more urgent than ever. Heavy Water Collective, 2025

"What Heavy Water has achieved in this large, salon-style hang – a deliberately dense, floor-to-ceiling arrangement – is a productive argument about the conditions under which landscape gets made into art. The format is not merely a nod to Weston Park Museum’s Victorian origins; it recreates the conditions of pictorial density in which nineteenth century audiences often encountered landscape painting. Industry and pastoralism, the scientific and the spiritual, the extracted, the defiled and the mourned: these are not presented as opposites to be reconciled but as a set of ongoing, unresolved tensions that the collection contains.

[...] That elegiac note resonates throughout the show at Weston Park too. The bottles of volcanic ash, the Sorby lantern slides, the Bronze Age urns, the kneeling child who lost its nose to an air gun: all are objects gathered against the erosion of time. The museum itself is a monument to this refusal – to the human insistence on holding things, on keeping. Gathering Landscapes is not uncritical of that insistence; it knows that the urge to collect is also the urge to possess, and that the land collected from is never neutral ground."

Jay Drinkall, Corridor8, 2026. Read the full review here

From 28th November 2025 to Sunday  1^st November 2026

Further details here