Ritual, memory and the slow work of liberation in Michaela Yearwood-Dan’s luminous new commission.
14 April 2026
At the Whitworth, Michaela Yearwood-Dan unfolds a space that feels at once devotional and defiantly intimate. ‘The Practice of Liberation’ marks the artist’s first institutional exhibition in the UK, a decisive moment that gathers painting, ceramics and sound into an immersive environment shaped by memory, ritual and refusal.
Comprising fourteen paintings and a constellation of ceramic vessels, the exhibition draws on the visual language of Catholicism while unsettling its authority. Stained glass becomes abstraction, the Stations of the Cross dissolve into painterly fragments, and text slips across surfaces in gestures that are as diaristic as they are political. Here, Yearwood-Dan writes herself into and against inherited histories, threading together references that move from James Baldwin to bell hooks, from personal reflection to collective struggle.
What emerges is not a fixed statement but an atmosphere. Liberation is proposed not as arrival but as practice, something iterative, tender and ongoing. In this layered installation, colour, sound and language hold space for vulnerability and imagination alike, inviting viewers into a shared process of unlearning and becoming.
This exhibition is on view at The Whitworth from 17 April until 18 October 2026.
