Yorkshire Sculpture Park

On the 7^th November, Sixth Form Art students visited the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield. The Year 12 art theme for this term is natural world and ‘Take an object, do something to it, do something else to it’, as quoted by Jasper Johns. Several artists were presenting their work at the Park’s galleries and throughout the grounds. Just walking casually around before a tour, we stumbled across numerous man-made works blended into the landscape. This was most shown by Barbara Hepworth’s ‘Family of Man’; a series of bronze geometric shapes stacked upon each other and scattered amongst the trees.

I most enjoyed seeing the plans of Goldsworthy’s works on display, his thought process on paper.   We were able to see the reasoning behind and how recurring ideas and patterns developed as he experimented more.   For example, the serpentine shape occurs in his experiments with snow, making a trail whilst creating a snowball, in his works with leaves, and in Morecombe Bay, where he carved this form into the sand when the tide was out and photographed it at different times of the day.   For me, Goldsworthy’s Morecombe Bay work had the greatest impact, especially one particular film made of Goldsworthy’s lower legs walking along the bay in continuous motion, not even disrupted by jagged rocks or uneven surfaces in the sand.

Rosie, Year 12

Depending on which direction we walked in, we were greeted with a series of Elisabeth Frink’s or Henry Moore’s surrealist figures, integrated within the landscape. Both artists are highly expressive in their work, but in completely different ways; whilst Frink’s men are slightly distorted to emphasise their endurance or vulnerability, Moore’s women are much more abstract and impressive in their scale.

Jessica, Year 12

We were lucky enough to be given a tour by the curator of the Goldsworthy exhibition. She explained the thinking behind the layout of the exhibition as well as allowing us to gain an insight into Goldsworthy’s working practices. Some of us were even inspired enough to turn our hand to reproducing his well known “leaf throws”. The combination of the natural surroundings and the organic themes running through his art worked perfectly: there was a room made of logs and a wall made of chestnut stalks and thorns. Both, in their own ways, showed how innovative an artist could be using only nature’s most mundane objects.

Katrina and Susy, Year 13