Exhibition examining human connections to the land through over 400 objects from Sheffield's collections, curated by Heavy Water Collective.
Gathering Landscapes: 150 Years of Collecting is on at Weston Park Museum until 1 November 2026, and it's one of those exhibitions that really lets you see the scale of what's kept behind the scenes here in Sheffield. The show was curated by Heavy Water Collective, the artist trio of Maud Haya-Baviera, Victoria Lucas and Joanna Whittle, who were invited by Sheffield Museums to dive into a collection of more than a million objects—the vast majority of which have rarely been on public display.
What they've brought out is a mix of over 400 items spanning art, archaeology, natural science and social history. There's a figure carved from Sheffield millstone grit dating from 43-450 CE, volcanic ash from Mount Vesuvius (1872), a 2,000-year-old stone head of the goddess Artemis dredged near Pozzuoli and donated to the city in 1875, and Bronze Age burial vessels collected by the Victorian antiquarian Thomas Bateman. It's a strange, wide-ranging spread that pulls together things from very different times and places, all held in the same city collection.
Those museum pieces sit alongside the artists' own work, which draws on witchcraft, folk magic and mourning rituals. You'll find jesmonite ouroboroses and historic glass unguent bottles—the kind used to collect the tears of mourners—placed right next to the archaeological finds. The whole thing is built around the museum's own history: the collection dates back to the Sheffield Literary and Philosophical Society, which was the foundation of Weston Park Museum when it opened in 1875.
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Entry is free, with a suggested donation of £5. The museum is on Western Bank, Sheffield S10 2TP, and the exhibition runs until 1 November 2026.
