Different Dimensions: Art and Adventures in Yorkshire

On a powerpoint slide, through a photographer's lens, within a mounted frame, behind glass, beyond the computer screen....the arts as we often know them are often contained and separated from us, flattened in the distant and abstract world of 'culture,' that, in the age of the internet and television, is more incomprehensively vast.   In a strange turn of events, the more available art has become to us through these avenues, the more we forget the reality of their presence; in the great sea of our image-laden world, the beauty and value of the image, for all its two- and three-dimensional impacts in and on our lives, has been diminished.

'Inside' the world of Barbara Hepwroth's art at The Hepworth-Wakefield Museum

This is why I think I particularly enjoyed a day in Yorkshire recently, encountering art in new ways in Wakefield.  On that lucky, blue-sky morning, a short jaunt away from York brought us to both the Yorkshire Sculpture Park and the not-so-far-away Hepworth-Wakefield Museum.


The Yorkshire Sculpture Park was a vast reserve of nature and art, nestled together harmoniously on rising and falling hilltops of countryside.  Artists like Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore worked specifically to put this sculpture in the landscape, as the landscape itself had inspired them to create these beautifully voluptuous forms.  The textures, colours, sizes of the shapened metals came to life as the light changed, existing as they did with the trees and the birds, the meadows and the skies, and even the sheep!

A Henry Moore enjoying the company of a herd of sheep. 

Spotting an Anthony Gromley in the treetops. 

It was amazing to see the beautiful sculptures amid these beautiful and ancient trees, which were sculptures in themselves!

Can you spot the Henry Moore across the lake?

Bird-watching, beetle-spotting, and searching for the next sculpture. 

At The Hepworth-Wakefield Museum, the art was presented in a different but also equally illuminating way.  In the gallery context, the sculptures and paintings created a landscape on their own, shown as they were with other sculptures of the period and the drawings and processes it took to make them.  I am very fascinated by artists' drawings, especially as they move between two and three-dimensional, small and large spaces and works, and the museum presented Hepworth's and Moore's processes in particular very eloquently. 

A Henry Moore with some gorgeous drawings of Stonehenge and how the light of the moon plays on dark surfaces. So beautiful!

Hepworth's Mother and Child with some portrait studies in the background. 

The thing I loved about the presentation of these sculptures was the lighting. The surfaces, like in the landscape, were intensified, the colours deepened, and the shadows heightened. The interplay between the sculpture and its shadow was of particular interest to me. 

A gorgeous Hepworth painting. 

I loved the details.

Study for a Crucifix 

The Crucifix 

Sculptures creating landscapes of their own. 

Together, the Sculpture Park and the Museum made a real case for experiencing art in all its dimensions, whether it is explicitly a multi-dimensional sculpture or a painting, that has hidden dimensions, meanings and physical layers of its own.  Experienced in a day, I came away impressed by the case they made for art's multi-dimensional physical presence; how it emerges from, creates and engages landscapes of both the artist and the audience. 

To read more on Barbara Hepworth, consult Susan Cohn's earlier blog....

Photos by author and Simon Crouch