Oh it’s all happening here, extremely busy run up to half term and I’ve been so busy I’ve realised I forgot to post this the other week, I’ve just found it in the ‘draft’ box . It’s a bit out of date and not in sync as my lodgers have been gone a couple of week’s but thought I’d post it anyway to share with you a bit of the cultural side of South Yorkshire. I’ve also been somewhere lovely this weekend and feel all Springlike, like it’s nearly time to stop hibernating, but I’ll tell you about that next weekend as there will be no adventures next weekend, the magical mystery tour will be temporarily on hold for a couple of days as I’m in hospital, which will drive me crazy, thank goodness for books and music! So here goes, sorry it’s late.
Last weekend was an adventure of a more sedate kind for me. I’m slightly injured with a sore tendon so there was no Park Run for me, just a steady little 5 mile trot around the village to see when and how much it hurt. It hurt, so the rest of the weekend went at a more gentle pace. I still needed to get out and about though.
I like art, it was one of my favourite subjects at school. I’m still really creative now and love to make and do crafty things, and I love an art gallery. Unfortunately no-one else in our house does like a gallery, even the one who studied art, so I’m on my own on this one and there’s nothing worse than trying to drag someone around a gallery who’s just not interested. I’m a bit of a traditionalist when it come to art though and some of the more modern weird and wonderful stuff I get, but some I just don’t understand. I particularly like sculpture because I like 3D and I like to touch and feel art. I think it’s harder to portray emotion and connect with the viewer in a painting than it is in a sculpture. I’ve never been moved to tears by a painting but I have a sculpture, and that was the ‘Abduction of Proserpina’, a huge Baroque marble sculpture by Italian artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini in the Borghese Gallery in Rome. Whist it covers an uncomfortable subject I don’t think there is another sculpture which captures the detail like Bernini does in the grip of Pluto’s hands on Proserpina’s thigh. When you get up close to it in the gallery it looks perfectly lifelike, from the veins on the back of his hand, the profile of his muscles, the creases on his knuckles, the indents in her flesh and the bit that you can’t see on the photo below is the way he has managed to carve the emotion of abject terror into the features of her face, for me there is no other piece as beautiful as this. I’ve visited a lot of galleries all over Europe but this one piece in the Borghese Gallery in Rome is still my favourite.
Now it will be no surprise to you that Yorkshire, God’s own county don’t forget, being as amazingly beautiful as it is, was the birth place and home of some very famous artists. David Hockney is Bradford born and bred, Barbara Hepworth from Wakefield, Henry Moore from Castleford and, although born in Bristol, Damien Hirst grew up and studied in Leeds. As a result of this, Yorkshire has the ‘Yorkshire Sculpture Triangle’ which encompasses four leading cultural venues; Yorkshire Sculpture Park in West Bretton, The Hepworth Gallery in Wakefield and the Henry Moore Institute and Leeds Art Gallery in Leeds.
I went to Bradford last year to the two main exhibitors of David Hockney’s work when one of my boys was completing his Art ‘A’ level and I was trying to inspire him (it did not work and he sat in the foyer on his phone but at least I tried), but it’s quite a few years since I’ve visited both the Hepworth Gallery and the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, despite the latter only being five minutes from me. Out of the above four artists Hepworth and Moore are definitely my favourites so I decided this weekend I’d have a bit of a steady arty weekend to rest my foot.
First stop in the morning was at the Hepworth in Wakefield, named after, and dedicated to, Barbara Hepworth.
The Hepworth itself is a work of art. It opened in 2011 at a cost of £35 million and won David Chipperfield Architects numerous awards. In 2017 it was named the UK’s Museum of the Year.
It’s a stark grey concrete building which almost looks like it’s floating on the river. It’s main permanent exhibition looks at the life and work of Barbara Hepworth and it has a number of key pieces of her work. Barbara Hepworth was born in 1903 and died in 1975 and her work would be classed in the genre of ‘modernism’. I don’t like a lot of modern art but I love her work. Her sculptures are of abstract shapes and in interviews she tells how she was inspired by nature and the world around her. She remembers driving through the countryside with her family, and the shapes, bumps and ridges of the roads, hills and fields. All of that is evident in her work and I think that’s probably why I can connect with her work, because I too have a very special connection with nature.
There are lots of flowing curving lines. She uses different textures, different materials and the sculptures just seem to blend into the landscape. To me her work, whilst good to look at in the Hepworth, is better viewed at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park as it almost feels like it needs to be outside where it just blends into the landscape. The only downside , and this goes for the Henry Moore work too, is that none of the work on display can be touched and it’s such a shame because I really feel like I want to touch it and I’m sure the artists intended for it to be touched to appreciate the lines, textures and different materials in the work.
Once I’d had my little Barbara Hepworth fix I went into the temporary exhibition which was a photography exhibition by Hannah Starkey. Her photographs are of women in staged settings and urban spaces. Her work particularly looks at equality, women’s right and femininity. She talks about women’s equality being the longest revolution in human history. Now I had mixed feelings about this one, because I have a bit of an issue with the feminist movement, well some of it anyway. However, the photographs were really good, and interesting, and there were some powerful messages, particularly in the photographs of women in exile and women in Belfast during the struggles of the 80’s. And yes they do send a powerful message about the strength of women and the fact that women are quite often the backbone that holds it all together in a crisis. Wars would not have been won without the toil, support and dedication of women in the background. I know how in our house it all falls apart very quickly without me around because I instinctively do too much for them when I’m there, but I’m just a lot more comfortable letting it all fall apart now after last summer. I leave them to it hoping that they will learn from the experience. So overall I thought the exhibition was really well executed and the message was good. No photographs allowed though so you’ll have to take my word for it.
What do I have an issue with then? I just think the feminism movement has gone a little bit too far sometimes. I think some people get the words ‘equality’ and ‘same’ mixed up and they are two entirely different things. I get the equal rights, voting rights, freedom of choice and putting a stop to some of the dreadful forced practices that occur throughout the world. However, we are not the same. Men and women are entirely different, we think differently, we behave differently and we are scientifically proven to be different to each other. Sometimes I think the movement seeks to polarise the two and promote the fact that one is better than the other, like so many of today’s movements do. We seem to have to have a sector of society to blame for the issues in another sector. It would be far better to just understand and respect each other’s differences and work together rather than claim to be the same or better. It’s got to the point now where if we are not careful the art of chivalry will be dead because no man will dare to display it. I’m quite comfortable with being a woman, I wouldn’t want to be a man, and I like a gentleman, I would be very sad if a man felt like he couldn’t open a door for me, pull my chair out for me when I go to dinner, tell me I look lovely, or offer to lend me his coat when I’m shivering cold.
After the Hepworth, the afternoon was spent at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. The park is 500 acres of beautiful rolling countryside, throughout which is scattered hundreds of sculptures. Some of them are permanent, like the Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth sculptures and some of them are temporary and the displays change on a regular basis. I particularly like the Henry Moore work in the park. Henry Moore was good friends with Barbara Hepworth and was active in the same time period. His work is similar and belongs to the ‘modernism’ genre but is often depicting the human form or mother and child in an abstract way. A lot of his work is in bronze.
There’s some really interesting work around the park at the moment. There’s an exhibition of Robert Indiana’s work, an American sculptor, whose work often speaks of human love and identity, his iconic ‘LOVE’ images being one of the key iconic images of 20th century art.
Then there are some really weird and wacky sculptures, like Daniel Arsham’s huge ‘Eroded Bunny’ and ‘Eroded Melpomene’ in bronze, and Sophie Ryder’s ‘Sitting’ Hare. I quite liked these.
But the most wacky to me are the Damien Hirst sculptures on display at the moment. I just don’t get them! Damien Hirst is the sculptor who caused a stir when he placed a dead cow in a glass box full of a formaldehyde solution in the name of art. A lot of his art incorporates the human or animal form and quite often exposes the inner of the body with the skin stripped off and organs, muscle and bone exposed. The one entitled ‘Myth’ is a unicorn and whilst I don’t understand it it’s not too jarring on the eye.
However, the other one ‘Virgin Mother and Child’ is completely lost on me. I find it quite horrific to look at. It was designed for display in the inner courtyard of Lever House in New York and is part of their art collection. It’s absolutely huge and sticks out like a sore thumb in the middle of the landscape. it’s basically a huge cast bronze sculpture of a pregnant woman, 36 feet tall, painted in bright car paint. Half of her entire body has been stripped of skin, exposing all the inner cranial head, muscular and circulatory system and and inverted foetus in her womb. I just did not get it and found it quite uncomfortable to look at, but that’s perhaps what he’s hoping to achieve, I don’t know. It’s just not my sort of art.
So that was my little wander this weekend, very sedate by my standards and living proof that people from Yorkshire do do culture. I will be back to much more exciting things next weekend hopefully if my injury feels a bit better. And here is living proof that it all falls apart in my absence.
Yes, I’m embarrassed to say that’s my kitchen sink. I was out for around 5 hours. I don’t think that constitutes child neglect as they are 19 and 22. The strange unidentifiable object directly below the sink on the right is the dishwasher! And no, the door has not broken, it opens quite easily, but the student arm is quite obviously incapable of opening it. The items in the sink are the breakfast pots, a milk bottle and an empty tin can which they must believe finds its own way to the recycling bin. Then when you run out of space in the sink and it gets to lunchtime you just start piling everything on the draining board. See, I told you it all falls apart. I did have a slight moan and made them tidy it themselves and yes of course I was “over reacting Mum”, they were always intending on clearing it up themselves apparently! Back to University after the weekend, so as per usual I’ll be jumping for joy on the station platform and then missing them like crazy five minutes later, but at least I’ll have a good few months of child free adventures and exploring until chaos descends again at Easter.