Horizontals Kew Gardens, Wakehurst. 2026
Carved fallen ash trees. Five participatory sculptures, 250 × 120 cm each. Photograph: Flora Westwood

Horizontal (Render) 

Horizontals (looking up) view from laying down on the sculpture of the near-extinct Nothofagus tree tops.  Video: Flora Westwood

In production, 6 fallen ash tress. Photograph: arboretum team Kew Gardens, Wakehurst

Horizontals is a series of participatory wooden sculptures made from fallen ash trees within the Wakehurst landscape. Carved on site by Wakehurst’s arboretum team, the forms emerge from the trunks through the lightest of cuts, pared back to what is necessary for rest.

Each sculpture is shaped as a horizontal platform, slightly slanted to cradle a single visitor’s 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 does not recline with ease. It is burnt out, sick and exhausted. Moore’s bronze reclining figures are recast for the present as living bodies that cannot hold the pose: flat out, lying down.

The work begins from the body’s knowledge 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, rest, look up, and be held by the forest.

Installed in the Nothofagus southern beech forest at Kew, Wakehurst. Curated by Laurence Sillars. Specially commissioned by Wakehurst in partnership with the Henry Moore Foundation.