Ronald Moody: Sculpting Life; Igshaan Adams: Weerhoud; Bharti Kher: Alchemies – review

Wakefield is at the centre of sculpture in Britain. Take a trip to the birthplace of Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth and you pass into the realms of three-dimensional art: 10 gracious galleries of these artists’ carvings and castings alongside many European masterpieces at the Hepworth Wakefield ; sculptures like standing stones all through the green pastures of nearby Yorkshire Sculpture Park ; plentiful buses to the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds.

An ever-changing programme of new shows, in addition, takes sculpture so much to heart that anyone who wants to steep themselves in this art, specifically of the past 100 years, will find it at its most condensed in these few square miles of Yorkshire.

One of this year’s most anticipated sculpture shows, for instance, gathers together the widely strewn works of the Jamaican-born artist Ronald Moody (1900-84) for the first time in full force at the Hepworth Wakefield. Small portrait heads in wood and bronze of gigantic figures such as Paul Robeson and Harold Moody, the artist’s brother, founder of the League of Coloured Peoples, are all concentrated personality. Hieratic figures in stone and oak unite the ancient past with Moody’s present in a startling visual poetry.

His art spans the 20th century, from the Caribbean island of his birth to London, with a spell in the 30s in modernist Paris, always with an insistent and vital figuration. The show opens with a philosophical vision: a double-sided human head, poised in the encircling embrace of a serpentine form that rests on an animal’s paw and curls up to an avian beak. Atavistic, yet lucidly modern in its fibreglass resin, the work is titled Man… His Universe .

Moody worked in wood from the 1920s onwards to captivating effect, using the grain to introduce rippling movement into the female form. Several figures, all titled Annie , seem to exist in dappled light, or even underwater currents. The heads are often slightly tilted, with the most delicate inflection of eye and lid to suggest an attitude of joyous thought.

Curvaceous and muscular, short and sturdy, these figures are all compressed strength, even when small enough to be picked up by the neck. A glorious head of Moody’s little niece is not much bigger than an infant fist, her lively personality nutshelled. Not much bigger is a man with an inner smile, arms firmly by his hardwood sides, in nothing more than a sarong: Moody’s incarnation of a priest.

There are Caribbean deities: witty and quixotic critters in bronze. Here is Savacou, a mythological bird in charge of wind and thunder, who will later turn into a star, its head brilliantly onomatopoeic: shaped like the very sound of a squawk. Moody’s massive 7ft version, cast in aluminium, still stands outside the University of the West Indies at Mona , its name shared with the Caribbean Artists Movement’s journal of the 1970s, edited by Edward Kamau Brathwaite.

Related: Dentist, modernist, activist: the many lives of sculptor Ronald Moody

Perhaps the most pan-global, indeed ecumenical, of all the sculptures here is Moody’s towering Johaanan of 1936 (bought almost 60 years later by the Tate). Apparently named after John the Baptist, this elm torso is curiously androgynous, swelling and undulating and shot through with the glimmering contour lines of the wood. The face has an inscrutable pharaonic expression, the body something of a beatific Buddha. Moody visited the British Museum in 1928, five years after arriving in England (originally to train as a dentist), and became transfixed, as he recalled, by “the tremendous inner force… the irrepressible movement in stillness” he found there. It is precisely what the finest of his own works possess.

If this show makes it quite difficult at times to discern Moody among his many influences and peers – objects from the British Museum, assorted artworks by other CAM members – it is well worth the slow and careful scrutiny. Moody’s art is powerfully benign, and the Hepworth Wakefield brings his humanity, in all its forms, strongly back into the light.

A parallel show by the South African artist Igshaan Adams , in the neighbouring galleries, has as much soul and even more beauty. Adams (born 1982) takes tapestry and transforms it into clouds, landscapes, rhythmic interweavings, even human figures. He is the most magical and inventive of textile artists at work today.

A downpour of open warps, in silvery twine, glints with a weather of shining beads, pearls, shells and stone chips to bring you straight into a deluge. A cascade of nylon rope, tiny dark elements caught up within it, suggests both crisis and waterfall. An extraordinarily complex structure of lace, cotton thread, fine chains and tiny jewels, suspended and bodying forth from the wall, folds and curves and appears to open its two arms wide. Ouma – grandmother – it is called.

You look at, and into, every spectacular thicket and web. And drifting above you, across the gallery, hang dust clouds and whorls that appear featherweight yet as momentous as a meteor shower. Danger and memory are caught within their staggering invention, out of fuse wire and lamp filaments, showerheads and silk threads, sharp clips and plastic ties. They hold colour and form as nebulously as actual clouds yet are spun out of Adams’s imagination and ingenuity, his art of living dreams.

At Yorkshire Sculpture Park, a few miles away, the British-Indian artist Bharti Kher (born 1969) has installed colossal china figurines across the landscape – or so it seems. In fact these curious goddesses are bronze casts of broken clay objects, reconfigured in new ways. A girl fits into a woman, 23 children’s heads sprout from a mother goddess and a female musician turns into her own tambourine. Late-flowering surrealism meets Asian tradition.

In the underground galleries, a solemn chamber of ultramarine bricks encloses the viewer. The Deaf Room is made of 10 tonnes of glass bangles, commemorating the notorious Gujarat riots of 2002, where more than 1,000 people died, and women were raped and burnt. White bindis blossom across broken mirrors like ice flowers in Milk Teeth and a monolith of old radiators, titled The Hot Winds That Blow From the West , resembles a heap of bleached bones: look twice, think again, be careful.

Kher’s art of hybrids runs to antlered women, cow-headed goddesses, and baboon-faced self-portraits. We are mythical beings, always part animal to her. Everything has its backstory – the crashed ambulance she came across near her London studio, and crushed; the saris her mother sold in Streatham, now painted with resin and draped like molten glass, in one case entirely concealing the figure beneath, a reference to Pakistan’s assassinated leader Benazir Bhutto.

Sometimes the intimation is clear, and lyrical; at other times, as with Cloud Walker , which refers to the Dakini dancers of Tibetan mythology, entirely opaque. But when form and content come perfectly together, no texts are needed. The thin red line that runs the full length of the YSP galleries, just above your head, glows in the day’s sunlight. It is an artery of glass bangles: a beautiful female bloodline .

Star ratings (out of five)
Ronald Moody: Sculpting Life ★★★★
Igshaan Adams: Weerhoud ★★★★★
Bharti Kher: Alchemies ★★★

• Ronald Moody: Sculpting Life and Igshaan Adams: Weerhoud are at the Hepworth Wakefield until 3 November

• Bharti Kher: Alchemies is at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park until 27 April 2025