The weekly feature rounds up the latest updates in museum appointments, openings, funding and new exhibitions from across the UK.
Museum Moves is supported by DJW Projects Limited: DJW Projects Limited. DJW Projects Limited is recognised as one of the UK’s leading forces in the audio-visual industry, providing creative lighting, Audio Visual and multimedia solutions globally to achieve the ultimate technological experience, using sound, lighting, vision and interaction.
Openings & closures
A date has been set for the opening of a new gallery at the Horniman Museum and Gardens. Its Natural History Gallery will reopen as the Nature Gallery on Friday 5 February 2027.
Horniman Museum and Gardens sets opening date for Nature Gallery
The transformation of Ipswich Museum is now in its final stages as the Suffolk attraction prepares to reopen its doors after a 4-year redevelopment. The museum reports it is on track to open in Spring 2027, as it celebrates its 180th anniversary.
Exhibitions
Gözde İlkin: Those Who Remember Their Births
Tate St Ives | St Ives
Opening: 10 October 2026 – Closing: 17 January 2027
Tate St Ives presents ‘Those Who Remember Their Births’, a site-specific commission by Turkish artist Gözde İlkin developed during two residencies in St Ives, bringing together sculpture, painting and embroidery to explore landscape, memory and women’s lived experiences. İlkin transforms vintage family bedsheets with batik and wire into suspended wave-like forms, drawing on archival photographs of women whose work in fishing, mining and textile production shaped the town, and works with local participants to create embroidered coverings for stones gathered from the shoreline.
Ronnie Wood: The Jimi Hendrix Portraits
Handel Hendrix House | London
Opening: 30 September 2026 – Closing: 11 April 2027
Handel Hendrix House presents ‘Ronnie Wood: The Jimi Hendrix Portraits’ at 23 Brook Street, Mayfair, Hendrix’s former home, featuring two new, previously unseen portraits of Hendrix in his Brook Street flat by Ronnie Wood, shown alongside prints of paintings inspired by photographs of Hendrix. The works, which include a depiction of Hendrix performing at the Bag of Nails club in Soho, draw on Wood’s own friendship with Hendrix in the 1960s. Entry is included in the admission price.
Wings of the Sea
World Museum | Liverpool
Opening: 10 October 2026 – Closing: 8 November 2026
World Museum presents ‘Wings of the Sea’, a display from the Shanghai Art Collection Museum showcasing Chinese art and the cultural links between the twin port cities of Liverpool and Shanghai. Visitors can see jade and stone carvings, metal sculpture, ceramics and paintings of rural life, alongside folk art including paper cuttings, embroidery and enamelwork, and costumes, portraits and painted masks from Peking Opera, which UNESCO designated a national cultural treasure in 2010.
The Red Dress
Cornwall Museum and Art Gallery | Truro
Opening: January 2027
Cornwall Museum and Art Gallery presents ‘The Red Dress’, the world’s largest collaborative embroidery project, conceived and managed by artist Kirstie Macleod. Constructed from 87 panels of burgundy silk dupion, the garment travelled internationally between 2009 and 2023, embroidered by 380 contributors from 51 countries including refugees, survivors of conflict, artisans and first-time stitchers. It is accompanied by Madeleine Walker’s ‘Urban Sirens’, a hand-embroidered cape exploring sustainability and Cornish folklore.
Living Labyrinths: Art and Fungi
Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Gallery | Exeter
Opening: 3 October 2026 – Closing: 21 February 2027
The Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Gallery presents ‘Living Labyrinths: Art and Fungi’, exploring the cultural world of fungi through scientific enquiry and themes of symbiosis, biodiversity and medical mycology, with works in ceramic, glass, photography, painting and textile. Newly conserved specimens and drawings from RAMM’s collections have inspired two new commissions — a large-scale drawing of the human mycobiome by Gemma Anderson-Tempini and bio-sonic sound art by Jason Singh — shown alongside watercolours of fungi by Beatrix Potter and Cy Twombly’s 1974 collage series ‘Natural History, Part I, Mushrooms’.
Funding
Test Valley Borough Council and Andover Town Council have approved £150,000 to secure the Andover Museum and Museum of the Iron Age until March 2029. Hampshire Cultural Trust will develop sustainable options while councils monitor progress.
