Yorkshire Sculpture Park
As we’re forced to head outside this winter, we’re looking to an open-air art museum for awe and wonder in a natural setting.
What is it: A nine-foot-high Birkin bag. An oversized teapot in which to rest. A blank snowman in the middle of a glistening pond. Yorkshire Sculpture Park is an awe-inspiring museum without walls, with over 80 modern and contemporary sculptures set across 500-acres of the historic eighteenth-century Bretton Hall estate.
What you need to know: Since it was founded over 40 years ago by Peter Murray (also the current Executive Director), a young art lecturer inspired by European sculpture parks who had the radical idea to create an outdoor art exhibit, YSP has evolved from the UK’s first sculpture park to once of the largest in Europe and one of the most world-renowned. Through its ever-changing displays and temporary exhibitions in its enclosed galleries, YSP brings new audiences to the practice of sculpture — redefining what it is and how we view it — while enabling wider access to art and opening the field for all.
Why you’ll love it: Although there’s obviously a focus on the artworks themselves — including classics by local artists Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore — it’s so much about how those works are situated in the surrounding environment, their dialogue with the forms of nature around them, that creates the awe-inducing and reflective situations that YSP has become known for. The outdoors replaces the architecture of the museum — trees instead of white walls, grass banks instead of wooden floors, light derived from sunlight instead of overheads — to create a living context of a very different kind.
With art embedded in nature, our perception shifts according to location, light, time of day, and the seasons. No longer static, each work’s place in the landscape is sensitively considered – part of the evolution of YSP has been the transformation of the landscape that holds it to be a more fitting backdrop for its sculptures and audiences. Recently opened award-winning visitor center The Weston designed by architecture practice Fielden Fowles and built on the site of a former quarry, takes inspiration from land artists Michael Heizer and Robert Morris. And in case you need a reminder that art and nature sit closely together here, you’ll find sheep wandering amongst its sculptures and herons found by its art trails.
Why we think it's different: After a year that has seen its capacity to bring in visitors drastically reduced (80% of revenue is from audiences on-site), YSP has also recognized a silver lining, its vital role in its audience’s wellbeing, creating much-needed opportunities to bring people outdoors and to connect with art and nature. YSP has become a location for refuge and reflection, a place that can give respite in an uncertain time. This builds on the work started in pre-COVID times such as YSP’s wellbeing program. Deputy Director, Heather Featherstone, recognizing the social and personal infrastructure that YSP provides, has commented that: “Museums and cultural organisations are the hidden social care that no one really talks about.” YSP encourages a way of being and a mode of engagement that goes beyond the typical museum audience experience, with impacts beyond a visit and into our everyday lives.
In their own words: “YSP’s driving purpose for 40 years has been to ignite, nurture and sustain interest in and debate around contemporary art and sculpture, especially with those for whom art participation is not habitual or familiar. It enables open access to art, situations and ideas, and continues to re-evaluate and expand the approach to considering art’s role and relevance in society. Supporting 45,000 people each year through YSP’s learning programme, this innovative work develops ability, confidence and life aspiration in participants.”
Something to do: Art for all? Participate in new public art initiative, The Great Big Art Exhibition, hosted by Firstsite, Colchester with the support of partners such as Tate and the National Gallery. Here rainbows in windows are replaced by artworks created on a fortnightly theme, linking us to our neighbors and displaying the creativity that many of us have newly found in lockdown and beyond.
Another Place
In a moment when time is stretching out, Anthony Gormley’s “Iron Men” captures the wonder of shifting lives.
What is it: An extraordinary public artwork by British sculpture Sir Antony Gormley permanently installed on Crosby Beach in the North of England. One hundred cast-iron figures stand facing the horizon across a 2-mile radius of the beach. These naked figures were cast from the artist’s own body, though are rendered in different states of serenity. Since 2005, over 650,000 people have born witness to these “Iron Men”, while Turner Contemporary in Margate now has its own companion work Another Time XXI.
Why you’ll love it: In a moment when we’re being forced to live in the details of our lives, to notice changing colors on daily walks or even the differentiations in the wallpaper of our homes, Another Place is similarly about the passage of time. The subtle and major shifts that happen with these figures within a very demarcated area, feels like those that happen within our own individual – and now collective – experiences.
Sometimes the tide obscures the figures, sometimes it reveals them. Sometimes the shifting sands submerge them, before allowing them to emerge again. Barnacles grow along their limbs, rust disrupts the surfaces. The tides, the weather, the industrial backdrop, alter what this sculpture can be at different times of the day, in different seasons, in different years. Though it looks static, these weighty presences (weighing just under a ton each), when subject to nature are not permanently the same.
What you need to know: Oddly peripatetic themselves, the sculptures were previously exhibited on coastlines in Germany, Norway, and Belgium — and never found their way to their next destination, New York. In their own movements, and now final place, Gormley brings up the complex emotions associated with emigration, the anxiety around movement, the hope that such movement might bring, and the resoluteness when we find our place.
Why we think it matters: This is art not confined to the white-walled gallery. At the mercy of nature, open to anyone, Gormley recognizes the possibility of his work to capture the imagination of everyone from art pilgrims to dog walkers, beach lovers to sandcastle-building kids. Awe and wonder are held in these forms, the spaces between them and the spaces between those on the beach with them. Of Another Place Gormley has said:
“I want to see whether it’s possible for art to be everyone’s, in the same way that the sky is and it still seems to me, that that is the most exciting challenge in art. Can you make the conditions that surround us all the time, into an arena for a kind of awareness that wouldn’t exist before, and I guess Another Place is a good example of this, where we have a beach, we have tide, we have changing conditions of weather and night and day and into that you insert these works, but adequately spaced, to allow for people to walk between them and in fact it’s the space between that is critical always in the work.”
Or in their own words — well writer Jeanette Winterson’s: “Standing modestly at their posts, the Gormley bodies are guides. They have something of ancient Earth about them — these metal men, as though they have erupted out of the iron core of the world, uncertain of human form, not smoothed by millennia of natural selection, but only now cooled from molten. They could be an older life-form pushed up, tectonically, by a shift in the Earth’s plates, or returned from a past too old to imagine, through some yawn in time.”
How to bring this into your life: Take a masterclass with the artist: choose between Zabludowicz Collection talk, BBC’s quarantine drawing class or National Saturday Club’s body sculpting exercise.
To find out more: Website