Thursday 26 December 2013

Winter light on sculpture: a winter visit to Yorkshire Sculpture Park

Kevin & I decided to make the most of the amazingly beautiful winter weather today and enjoy it, because tomorrow the bad weather hits again. We have been meaning to visit Yorkshire Sculpture Park since we moved to Sheffield and it turned out that visiting in the middle winter is a most excellent idea.

Below are some photos from that part of the park we visited today. I forgot my camera so these pictures were all taken with my phone camera. Some of them haven't turned out too badly and I think show that Yorkshire Sculpture Park is well worth a visit.

Molecule Man, Joanthan Borofsky

Wonderful detail against the blue winter sky

The Family of Man, Barbara Hepworth. Born in nearby Wakefield.

The Family of Man, detail. I loved the texture of the surface and the
way the light moved over and around it.

Nature is of course, an artwork in itself

The Ha Ha, Ha Ha bridge. Ha ha! By Brian Fell

Sculptures are fun too! (forgot to get the artist name, sorry)

There was also a lovely plant-themed art and poetry installation in a greenhouse by Alec Finlay called Propagator. This was fun, but also each poem was quite evocative of the plant it was describing.

i.e. Thrift:

         salT
     bleacHed
           dRifts
           pInks
           oF
     allsorTs
Milk Thistle

Valerian and Honesty

I probably would have added the plants themselves, but I guess that might take away from the poetry since it's also about the context in which the plants grow. Clearly I'm not an artist.

Inside one of the galleries was striking print-making art by Angie Lewin, such as the piece below on driftwood. We really loved the way she captured the 'living deadness of plants' (as I call it) and would have loved to take a couple of prints home. Maybe one day...


Screen shot from Angie Lewin: A Natural Line section of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park website

This post only a small sample of what you can see at the sculpture park. We didn't get to see much of it because with ME I get tired very quickly, despite frequent rests and hot chocolates.

There is still lots to see, not in the least sculptures by Henry Moore and Antony Gormley, and the current exhibition: Amar Kanwar: The Sovereign Forest + Other Stories, that we must get to before it ends on 2nd February 2014. We plan to visit again and again, taking in a different area of the park each time. I also suspect that visiting throughout the year in different seasons, will cast a different light on the sculptures.

The Yorkshire Sculpture Park is now on our 'must show' list of places to take friends to when they visit us in Sheffield.