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 near extinct Nothofagus southern beech forest at Kew, 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.

Find out more about Henry Moore and More  opening at Wakehurst, Kew Gardens, on 5 June 2026 and running until 23 May 2027.