A giant cartoon-like figure appears through the trees. Rain falls silently onto its wooden shoulders and bowed head. Not far away, a huge woman with a rabbit’s head looks down the grass slope, while 10 headless figures are seated nearby on large metal chairs. This is not a mirage or nightmare, but pieces of internationally acclaimed artwork on display at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP) in Wakefield, West Yorkshire.
landscape
The YSP is located in the buildings and grounds of Bretton Hall, a former college on the edge of the city. In 1977, a young art lecturer called Peter Murray had the idea of placing sculptures in the grounds. It was the beginning of a unique concept: a dedicated park for outdoor sculpture. Today, Murray is Executive Director of the YSP, which is visited by half a million people every year. There are over 80 sculptures to be appreciated. In a huge park, criss-crossed with paths, finding some of them can be like playing a game of hide and seek. The exhibitions are constantly changing, with only a small permanent collection. Current displays include works by the enigmatic Swiss artist Not Vital, Chinese dissident Ai Weiwei, New York pop artist KAWS, and British sculptor Anthony Gormley.
local heroes
Thousands of local people visit the YSP every year. Schoolchildren and students are inspired to create their own works of art. As the YSP approaches its fortieth birthday, its curators continue to select ambitious contemporary work from around the world to sit alongside works by famous, locally born, artists Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth.
CON AUDIO:
The Great Outdoors
Yorkshire is England’s largest county and, not surprisingly, it has produced many famous people. In the arts world contemporary figures include the writer Alan Bennett and the artist David Hockney. Yorkshire artists of the past include two sculptors, Henry Moore (1898-1986) and Barbara Hepworth (1903-1975). If you want to admire their work and the local landscape at the same time, then you should visit the Yorkshire Sculpture Park near Wakefield. Here their work is on display outdoors and, as the Park’s Senior Curator, Helen Phebey, explains, Henry Moore would have approved:
Helen Phebey (Yorkshire accent): The Yorkshire landscape was crucially important to his development as an artist, and it was interesting when we did our Henry Moore show last year, we worked very closely with the Foundation and with Henry’s daughter Mary, and she said at the opening, she kind of woke up in her hotel room, opened the curtains, was like, “My God! These are the landscapes my father was drawing in his later years when he was too frail to make sculpture anymore.” And she’d always thought they were imaginary landscapes, but she realized they were absolutely rooted back here in the North and so all of those connections are really important and, interestingly, Henry Moore said he wanted his work to be seen with sheep. He said they were the right scale to give his work monumentality, that a cow was too big and a dog was too small. So he did a lot of work, he did a sculpture called Sheepies and a lot of sketches of sheep, and so it’s perfect here, it’s a perfect setting.
british weather
But how do the sculptures survive outdoors in a country that isn’t exactly famous for its good weather?
Helen Phebey: It’s a really good point because the weather and the season makes a huge difference to how the sculpture appears, and Hepworth and Moore were absolutely passionately committed to having their work on display in the open air and Hepworth said, for example, that her sculpture could breathe and it was animated, it came to life, and Henry Moore – as well, it was a social intent – so Henry Moore was absolutely fascinated with Stonehenge, and when he was a student went to see it and he did sketches and drawings and etchings and of it throughout his career and I think for him putting sculpture in the open air was to make it relevant again in people’s lives. So we’ve been making art for as long as we’ve been human, at least 40,000 years, and the last three or four hundred years it’s become institutionalized and curators like myself have come in between people and the artwork.
art by email
But the Park doesn’t only display the work of Yorkshire sculptors of the past. You can also find work by New Yorker KAWS and other international names. And, as Helen Phebey explains, the YSP will be exhibiting work by artists from the war-torn nations of the Middle East:
Helen Phebey: We’ve tried to get the artists over here and we can’t, so we’re going to do an exhibition of art by email and that’s open to all countries of the Middle East where their travel over here is really restricted, so Syria, Iraq, Iran, and we’re inviting photography and film, but we can also do sculpture that can be sent by email that we can 3-D print, so performance by instruction, our sound work... and we’re going to do a Skype artist conversation on the artists and we’re going to try and do a virtual residency, and the real key thing about that is revealing how difficult it is for people to travel, but also that they’re making really incredible, beautiful work that isn’t always about what’s happening, so not always about war, it’s not about what you’re seeing, there’s still a resilience and there’s a hope and there’s a creativity, and it just gives,
I think, an insight. I always use my mum as the measure of everything we do, and, you know, my mum just kind of goes, “Oh, they’re just like us!”