Yorkshire Sculpture Park, England - by Tony Cragg (1949), English

Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP), UK -:- Part 2

Standard Kitchen 2017 by João Vasco Paiva

That's a pretty standard kitchen, well aside from the fact that's it's completely stone and thus non functional. It was definitely not something I expected to find on my way back, but I liked this sculpture. It's well spaced, and you can easily imagine someone cooking here. The minimal bumps also give it a more lived-in in and used l, ok which I think suits a standard kitchen adequately.

I visited the Yorkshire Sculpture Park on Friday after seeing the video of Gerard Way promoting the Hand Me Downs exhibition - there was no sign of Gerard, alas, but the collection was super cute!!

also they were selling this in the gift shop and uhhh, well, £175 is a bit out of my price range right now, but I would have absolutely taken her home with me if I could 🥺

Yorkshire Sculpture Park

December 2022

Lakwena Maciver, Righteous Like We (HA-HA), 2022 Courtesy the artist and Vigo Gallery, London.

Lakwena Maciver’s Murals Offer a Blueprint for a Better World

To stumble upon one of Lakwena Maciver’s kaleidoscopic murals is to confront a kind of spiritual affirmation.

Photo © Jonty Wilde, courtesy Yorkshire Sculpture Park

A green and pleasant land (HA-HA)

A green and pleasant land (HA-HA)

A green and pleasant land (HA-HA)

A green and pleasant land (HA-HA)

A green and pleasant land (HA-HA)

Sketch from a trip to Yorkshire Sculpture Park! Elvis Presley statue had a Rock and Roll tongue, thought it was pretty cool

Yorkshire Sculpture Park

Yorkshire Sculpture Park is brilliant, ’cause it’s in Yorkshire. I could end this post here, after that zealous statement, but I’ll endeavour to extol a few more virtues of a jaunt to this idyllic artistic paradise. YSP is near Wakefield in West Yorkshire, (which is where I’m from, if you hadn’t guessed). It has gazillions of acres of parkland, gardens, lakes, woods and buildings to roam…

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Yorkshire Sculpture Park

Yorkshire Sculpture Park is a great day out for those who love walking and sculpture. It is set amongst 500 acres of rolling Yorkshire countryside and will get you to Olympic fitness if you want to tick off each of the art sculptures that have been made a home at the park. The park contains sculptures from a cavalcade of celebrated artists and sculptors from the last 100 years. Many pieces are quite new with some more famous older pieces from the likes of Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, and Anthony Caro to name but three. On the day I was at the park, the rain was torrential and did not yield, however, this added to the whole strange atmosphere of being set free in the estate on such an occasion. I felt alone with the art, for the most part, I was, not many others would brave the weather. I had crashed onto an alien world and was trying to piece together what or who could live on such a planet. Indeed, there is a statue of the astronaut, Neil Armstrong called Bronze Eroded Astronaut to guide me.  Daniel Arsham’s Unearthed Bronze Eroded Melpomene from 2021 was one such piece where it felt like my crash site was at the epicentre of a fallen ancient civilization, reminiscent of the film Planet of The Apes. It depicts a character called Melpomene, a Greek goddess and muse of tragedy. There is a part of the brain that believes what it sees, and this can have a discombobulating impact on the senses, especially as it was situated at the bottom of some neo-classical steps and balustrades from the formal gardens of the sculpture park. The sculptures and their decay are influenced by Arsham, as a child, having his family house destroyed in the early 1990s, by a hurricane.

I loved a few of the pieces, sometimes by the way a sculpture would just look or how it would interact with other close-by pieces and the landscape. At other times, just the size of a piece would have me feeling that sense of awe and a kind of diminishing of my importance under their vastness. Henry Moore’s Large Two Forms was sculpted in bronze from 1966-69 and was a magnificent work that felt like it had lived there for a thousand years. As with any of the best sculptures, I was left just staring at it from different angles and looking through its many contours and planes, which revealed and vanished as I walked around its dense solidity, that jolts up against the softness of its form.  Moore was raised local to the park, so it seemed very fitting for it to be part of this particular landscape.

I also loved the Barbara Hepworth group of sculptures called The Family of Man. I think this was my favourite set of sculptures at the park, I loved everything about the pieces and their relationship to each other. These were sculpted by Hepworth in 1970 and have been at the park since 1980. There is a family of nine pieces, and they are set upon a gentle slope surrounded by trees. ‘Set’ is the correct word as they appear like the gemstones of a fine necklace or ring. The patination of the pieces are sublime, the abstract nature betrays their very humane and familiar aura. I intensely felt that these have been made by a human. The rain gave the pieces a lustre, and the overcast sky would still allow some light to rebound off the remarkable perspectives of their surface; it was otherworldly and serene. My visit was worth it just for this personal moment with Hepworth’s work.

Moving on to the fungible fanatic Damien Hirst, there were one or two dramatic pieces at the park. The Virgin Mother 2005-2006, The Hat Makes the Man 2004-2007 and, I hate to say it, but I felt a deep nostalgic connection to Hirst’s other work, Charity 2002-2003. It consisted of a giant charity box statue of a little disabled girl wearing a calliper, which you would normally have found outside a 1960s/80s British Butcher’s or Newsagent’s shop. It was an outmoded way to pull at the heartstrings to make us part with our pennies for the Scope charity.  Its sheer size shrank me back to wet winter shopping outings outside local shops and how I would have viewed the little girl as not a charity case but maybe an upset little friend at that time. Anyway, it gave me a Proustian rush and it shows you can even like a piece of art from someone you do not like as an artist, be it just by tapping into nostalgia, which does tend to be a weak point, I admit. There were a few other notable pieces from other sculptors at the park. David Nash had some wooden steps rising up a grassy slope; there were many other sculptures from artists such as Anthony Gormley, Ai Weiwei, Willem Boshoff, and Elizabeth Frink, to name but a few.  It is well worth a day out for those who love art, and nature.    

Ha!

Yorkshire Sculpture Park

Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP), UK -:- Part 3

Relics in the Landscape by Daniel Arsham

There's a nice aged copper effect that brings across the idea that they've been there for a long while without maintenance, hence why they're called relics. The small gemstone bits poking out the 'eroded' parts help further this idea. I particularly like Pikachu as it's not something you would expect to see; especially in this style of sculpture.

Yorkshire Sculpture Park

1-4: Daniel Arsham: Relics in the Landscape 5: Barbara Hepworth: Squares with Two Circles 6: Barbara Hepworth: The Family of Man 7-8: Ro Robertson: Stone (Butch) 9: Niki de Saint Phalle: Buddha 10: Grenville Davey: Well

6 days until one year anniversary of gerard way rosy ronkey video

“Truck II” (2011)

Erwin Wurm’s Motley Crew of Suits and Sausages Cuts a Rug at Yorkshire Sculpture Park

Acclaimed Austrian artist Erwin Wurm’s first large-scale museum exhibition in the U.K., Trap of the Truth, includes nearly 75 sculptures indoors and dotted around the landscape, plus numerous drawings, paintings, photographs, and videos created during the past three decades.

All photos by Jonty Wilde

Left: “Big Suit 2” (2010-2016). Right: “Step (Big)” (2021)

Left to right: “Untitled” (2018), “Giant Big, Me Ideal” (2014), and “Untitled” (2018)

Left to right: “Dance” (2021) and “Trip” (2021)

Magnolia by Rebecca Newnham

trying 2 get my head out of my ass and stop listening to the tpain/neyo she knows (you got that AHHAHHAHH) song sped up on repeat n do my replies whilst i have the time < /3