Yorkshire Sculpture Park

Today, we went on a cultural visit to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. I was looking forward to the trip as I had been one or two years ago, but to be honest I didn’t really take full advantage of what was on show the first time around. We started by looking at the map of where to go first. None of us (Me, Ben and Drew) are good at map reading so we just decided to head for the nearest sculpture and work our way around the entire park. I am glad we did this because it meant we were surprised more about what we saw rather than seeing an image of the sculpture on the map, before seeing the actual sculpture.

We had walked half way around the park before we came to the first sculpture that I found interesting (Most of the inspiring objects were in the other half of the park). The object was called, “Basket #7 .Oxley Bank”. It was just a large steel box at the top of a hill that you could climb up and sit inside. I think the fact you could interact with this exhibit made it my favourite of the day. The views from within the corrugated steal cage were stunning, even in the wind, and, well worth the steep walk up to it.



















The Longside Gallery which came just after the Basket was for me the most disappointing part of the Sculpture Park. I just didn’t understand why people would, 1 – bother to do this in the first place, and, 2 – donate money after seeing this exhibit. It was a large room with hanging displays of Sheep’s excrement that had apparently been done by the sheep walking around. A lot of people would consider this art but I don’t. Art should require some skill to produce or make you see things you don’t see at first glance. Tucked away in the back room was a sculpture of a Pineapple which I though was far superior to the buildings main display and I would have liked to have seen this taking up an entire room rather than a load of sheep waste.














Back at the start of the park I found the Underground gallery very inspirational. The Underground gallery had rooms with sculptures that had obviously taken a lot of effort to produce. The first sculpture in the entrance was a huge pine cone made of thick wooden branches all intertwined called the “Stacked Oak”. It was apparently free standing. The second thing in the Underground gallery to inspire me was the “Leaf Stalk Room”. This room had a wall of twigs all tied together that hung from the ceiling with a large circular hole in the middle. This again must have taken along time to produce and in my opinion it was well worth it.

Walking around the park has been a good experience and I fully recommend it to anyone who wishes to be inspired by objects that are far from ordinary.

Here are some other interesting images -