Wednesday 11 April 2012

sculpturalroadtrip




a road trip north to view sculpture – first stop Yorkshire sculpture park http://www.ysp.co.uk/ – a truly magnificent experience with old favourites like Goldsworthy and Nash spaced a good walk away from the car park doing their thing with wood and stone and landscape. Old school plonk art was well represented by a marvellous family set by Hepworth, some thoughtful Moore’s
others worth a mention are James Turrell’s Deer Shelter Sky Space, Helen Escobedo’s ghostly bales, Ursula Von Rydingsvard ‘s wooden piece in the orangery – the smell is transcendent and the large scale moiré optical effect experienced with Basket #7 by Winter/Hörbelt
Indoors the Miro show had his slightly too cartoony jokey sculptures interspersed with the more successful etchings, his motifs work and seem to present possibilities in 2D but seem too frivolous in 3 – the prints feel like they come from another time – its rare to see large scale rich well produced printmaking – it seemed to be all i saw when a student in the 80s.
Alec Finley’s Propagator, http://www.alecfinlay.com/projects_mesostic.html a greenhouse containing plant pots from which sprout mesostic poems based on the names of flora at the park was good but the work can also be found in an artists book – herbarium – only £10.00 http://www.alecfinlay.com/bookshop-books.html .
Sophie Ernst has a beautiful yet poignant show dealing with the idea of home – Ernst interviews people forced to leave their homes and builds an architectural model of the houses they describe. She then projects onto this sculpture video footage of the person's hands as they describe their memory of that building. http://www.ysp.co.uk/exhibitions/sophie-ernst-home
after an overnight stay in wakefield the first stop the next day was the Hepworth gallery http://www.hepworthwakefield.org/ what a gloriously brutal space, both the overall design and the stunning detail - all of which seem to disappear when looking at the work in the spaces. my favourite room in the collection was showing Hepworth in context with some good examples of the work of Nicholson, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Epstein.
the stand out work was a show by Heather and Ivan Morison which draws on the life and work of 20th century British novelist Anna Kavan, the gallery is full of exquisite objects that are beautifully conceived. http://www.morison.info/anna.html

i was interested in Hepworth’s way of blocking out of history – or rather tidying it up by painting all the windows of the building next to it black – somewhat ominous.
finally onto Caro at Chatsworth http://www.chatsworth.org/whats-on/events/caro-at-chatsworth the okay examples of his work were sited in the magnificent space - my favourite overhear comment was ‘but this one’s just bits of metal’ – i see a bookwork coming on..........

and then there was the solid northern smoking architecture.