What would August Bank Holiday be without rain? On the way back from a soggy camping trip in Derbyshire we stopped of at Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Since my first visit a year ago, it's been a joy to revisit and a place of inspiration and contemplation. This time it was to see the Miro exhibition. The ideas behind his creative process were most inspiring and the development of his work from two dimensions to three. His descriptions of creating three dimensional collages appealed to me as a collage artist and set of sparks in my imagination.
"I think of my studio as a vegetable garden. Here, there are artichokes. Over there, potatoes. The leaves have to be cut so the vegetables can grow. At a certain moment, you must prune. I work like a gardener or a wine grower. Everything takes time. My vocabulary of forms, for example, did not come to me all at once. It formulated itself almost in spite of me. Things follow their natural course. They grow, they ripen. You have to graft. You have to water, as you do for lettuce. Things ripen in my mind. In addition, I always work on a great many things at once. And even in different areas: painting, etching, lithography, sculpture, ceramics."
Miro interview with Yvon Taillandier 'I work like a gardener' in XXe Siecle Paris 1959
I really enjoyed Donna Wilson's quirky exhibition at Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Aware of her ceramics, I was less aware of the textile based work. I loved the riot of colours and shapes in the installations as well as her framed and wall mounted knitted trees and flowers. The exhibition runs until 26th February.
Happy New Year! A little belated but it's wonderful to have arrived in 2012. Not quite ready for it but have been scribbling in notebooks and wondering what's in my envelope of possibilities.
A few of my favourites from the holiday have been:
Favourite film: Coraline
We all hid behind the blanket for this one. A reminder that the grass isn't always greener.....
Although I had seen this book before, I had never read it. About the circle of life, it became 'mine' when I reached this page and read:
"The young woman had art in her hands, and she became a painter. She had her own small house in the town now and worked there in a room generous with light. In the evenings, she walked through the town to her parents' house or to friends' houses. She had love in her heart and fell for a friend of a friend of a friend.
Soon enough she moved to a bigger house in the town with him. She had a child in her belly and by the year's end was a mother, painting her pictures as her child slept in her cot next to the easel. Time passed slowly and brought many people who wanted to buy a painting. Another child was born."
I really enjoyed revisiting Yorkshire Sculpture Park as a family. Though it was a blowy, rainy day, the inside galleries where the Jaume Plensa exhibition runs until January 22nd, gave us plenty of refuge from the elements and the whole day was restorative after the rigours of Christmas!
We had a wonderful New Year celebration with good friends, that I am just about recovering from!
Wishing you and yours a 2012 stuffed full of possibilities.
Today I made my first visit to Yorkshire Sculpture Park in the company of sixty six year olds (that's sixty small children not a group of older persons!). I was helping out on a school trip and it was great to see the works through their eyes. The temporary exhibition was the work of Jaume Plensa. An artist I hadn't heard of before; his work sat beautifully in the park setting. In the inside space were his sculpted alabaster heads that had such a calming effect on all who entered the room. His wall mounted 'Speak no evil', 'Hear no evil', 'Say no evil', cast you as the fallen angel, the one weighted to the floor by the weight of the world, or perhaps the one who is light and free, looking down at the 'floor' that was the 'wall'. Plensa's works seem to levitate and transport you, he manages to sculpt souls and engage the viewer in a meditation on mind, body and soul. Beautiful. I can't wait to go back, hopefully to see the works glistening in the Autumn sunshine as they were today.
