Recently-crowned Yorkshire’s Tourist Attraction of the Year, Yorkshire Sculpture Park has a summer of new exhibitions that features an all-female line up for the very first time.
Making art accessible for everyone, YSP has 500 acres for visitors to explore, with several indoor exhibition spaces as well as a restaurant, cafés and gifts shops if the weather is still a little unpredictable. Dogs are also welcome.
For this summer, the top billing goes to British-born Bharti Kher, one of the world’s leading contemporary artists, with her show Alchemies that celebrates diversity, discovery and personal identity. Bharti centres her sculptures on the female body whilst also addressing timely political issues around identity. Using the light-filled spaces of YSP’s largest gallery and surrounding garden, the exhibition celebrates Kher’s extraordinary sculptures, representing different approaches and periods of her career. Through her work, she also considers the roles of women in society and culture, and their assigned places. She presents women as everything from mothers, workers, monsters, warriors, and deities.
YSP has been blessed with an abundance of riches this summer, also presenting an exhibition of work by the late Dame Elisabeth Frink (1930-1993). Gifted to YSP - a registered charity and accredited museum - the varied and timeless selection of works explore and celebrate animals and the human figure.
For Frink, animals symbolised powerful natural forces and showed both the struggles and celebration of life. The wildness, strangeness and freedom of birds was also a notable fascination. Similarly, horses and dogs were enduring in her work, with her prints and sculptures showing the deep connection that she felt for the forms and personalities of animals.
Installed outdoors, several of her bronze sculptures explore humanity and its histories, habits and tragedies. Atlas, for example, is a towering mythological figure holding the weight of the earth above him and the Riace figures were inspired by the archaeological discovery of ancient Greek bronzes. Also new for this summer is a body of original work by York-based painter Carol Douglas - her largest exhibition to date. Actually I Can includes 51 new paintings of various sizes, all of which will be for sale for those who want to enjoy original art of their own.
Douglas, who was dissuaded from pursuing an arts qualification at school, has developed her own style since taking up painting in her 60s; painting with acrylic and applying it to the canvas using rollers rather than the traditional paint brush. She builds the paint up layer after layer, with a warm palette of greys, browns and mustards, and depicts recognisable household objects and people in domestic settings.
The exhibition’s title Actually I Can is inspired by Douglas’s background. Following a very successful career as a sociologist and community worker, she enrolled onto an art foundation course at York College in her 60s. Now in her 70s, Douglas has exhibited in several galleries in the UK. Carol explained: “I spent many years disappointed in myself for not going to art college, for not being brave and challenging my parent’s decisions. To discover that I could take an Arts Foundation course at 66 was a revelation.
I jumped at the chance. I am still surprised by my success. I never imagined I would sell my work and be shown in galleries.” There is also an opportunity to see the Ugandan artist Leilah Babirye exhibiting in the YSP Chapel, but only for a few more weeks. Leilah’s exhibition Obumu (Unity) features new sculptures made at YSP, largely from materials found onsite.
She said: “My work is basically using trash, giving it new life and making it beautiful. It is always influenced by where I am working, I will use whatever is there. That’s why the work always looks different, because I’m not sure what I’ll find.”
Leilah spent the summer of 2023 at YSP making a clan of seven larger-than-life-size figures in wood and five coloured ceramics. Supported by YSP’s technical team, seven sculptures were carved using a chainsaw and chisels from trees that had reached the natural end of their life on site. Babirye describes being guided by the wood itself, sketching the initial forms directly onto the sectioned tree. Once carved, the figures are refined and their surfaces sanded back to highlight the grains of the tree. The sculptures are then burned a deep black, which Leilah used to do to make the works ‘disappear’, but is now a gesture of celebrating their beauty.
Bharti Kher is showing until April 27, 2025, in the Underground Gallery and outdoors. Carol Douglas is open at the YSP Centre until October 27, 2024, with Elizabeth Frink’s work showing until 23 February 2025 at The Weston Gallery and outdoors within the Park. Leilah Babirye’s show in The Chapel is open until September 8.
Contact us
For more information and tickets, with 18s and under enjoying free admission, go to YSP.org.uk
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