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Meet Lucie (green hair) and Jake!
Also in front of one of the Kaws
Sculptures!
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We had our welcome day, enrolment day, a day where we got into the studios and sat down with our journals and showed them our work from over the holiday; Then Thursday was a bit of a break from all of that.
On Thursday our course leader had planned a slightly relaxing day out in Yorkshire; to Yorkshire Sculpture Park and then the Barbara Hepworth museum.
The reason I say it was only slightly relaxing is basically because we had to take our journals around with us the whole day, make notes, write down things that could be important for our work and draw things that we liked... I just kind of made odd doodles with scribbly pens.
It was only an hour and a half away from where we met near the university, it was tiring, quite a tiring day.
It started off quite gloomy, when I left Ilkeston there was a thin layer of mist everywhere and it was quite dark, it was even worse when we got into Yorkshire. The whole park was covered in mist and even the tress looked like some weird giant sculptures, it did brighten up throughout the day... When we where on a mile hike to another bloody gallery.
To begin with, we walked around the underground gallery next to
the main visitors centre; in there they had the "Not Vital" exhibition. Not Vital is an artist I`ve never heard of before, he`s a Swiss artist and if I remember correctly then this is his first UK Major Exhibition. I have to say though, he did have a large amount of work to then fill the spaces that he had been given.
His work was scattered all over the Park; it covered the three rooms inside of the Underground Gallery, he had two large Stainless steel (I think) sculptures, one in the main field and one on top of the underground gallery. He also had a range of ceramic head sculptures outside of the gallery, and then had taken up all of the space inside of the Garden Gallery.
The garden Gallery is based above the underground gallery, you have to walk up and over the underground gallery and there`s a small space inside of there for more work.
I wasn`t impressed with some of the work; there was a room with a huge wall that just had dark circles on that was supposed to represent faces, the next room had giant Steel heads (I was impressed with those), The next room had a range of smaller but weirder sculptures. Some of those where on the walls and some where in the middle of the room for you to walk around.
Then there was another room called Bridges, which had a lot of weird stainless steel sculptures inside, some of them where bridge like and others didn`t make any sense. Some of them where rather skilled though, the steel itself had a gorgeous shiny finish and very sharp edges, so it was skillful work.
In the Garden Gallery; they had a range of Not Vital objects and souvenirs that you could buy, they even had a mould of his nose that had been cast in bronze and then altered to look like gold... But you couldn`t buy that, it had been given to the park especially. In there they also had three or four little pocket rooms, in each one they had three images by Not Vital... Unfortunately I wasn`t
impressed with them as well. They seemed to be hand made sheets (like made out of fibres) and then they had tiny bits of work on them, that I wasn`t impressed with really. I think if your going to make things out of fibres and work on top of them, then you should really be working with something that compliments the fibres and affects the fibres... Not just a few marks and that`s it! Like painting on top of it so the fibres then come loose, or drawing on top which would leave dents and lines in the fibres but not necessarily the pen (fibres wouldn`t really let the ink settle). |
| A piece by Henry Moore. |
I split up and went off with Lucie, Mel and Evie; however we didn`t actually know if we could walk off yet and go and see other exhibitions so we kind of just wondered around near the pond and the flower buds for a while and then went off on a small hike... the small hike was also a sorry attempt at not getting lost.
If anything, we didn`t quite get lost, we just became somewhat confused with were we where and were we where supposed to go next. We knew that we had to meet up back at a small cafe near where our bus was, but we didn`t know exactly where that was..
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| Another Henry Moore |
The area was just called Country field or something, it was where all of the outside sculptures where based and there was quite a lot of them, but because of the amount of time we had before we had to re-group we didn`t have the chance to get round them all.
We got to see Turrells skyspace; an underground brick area, you walk into one of the two doorways, which leads you into a large room underground, in that space there`s seating all around the room and you look up at the sky which has been framed. It`s supposed to be an interactive piece since the art isn`t just there for you to look at, you have to sit and wait for the sky to change and for the clouds to float by... It was rather relaxing, I could of sat in there for a while if I could of but we had to leave quite quickly so we could then re-group.
Before we re-grouped, we went over to the Chapel; there we was supposed to see another artist who had been working on a large scale exhibition... It was locked, even though there was sooo many different schools visiting and the place was packed, the bloody chapel was locked so we never actually got to see his work in the end.
Amongst all of that, we got to see other pieces that where hidden amongst bushes that we didn`t know about and we got to see some gorgeous views. But like I said before, we only saw like 3 or 4 other people head down towards that field, so I`m not really sure as to how many other people got to see some of the same stuff as we did.
After we all met up and finally had something to eat, we began to head up towards the Longside gallery; from the café we where sat at, the gallery was about a miles walk... It had just started to get very warm outside as well so the walk up there wasn`t one of the nicest walks I`ve had.We walked amongst a number of different sculptures to get up there, one looked like a sexual bunny, there was a row of seated people? or something along the lines of that. A bronze person stood on top of a large tree...
And OBVIOUSLY, one of my favourite sculptures of all time had a large exhibition on. KAWS.
I love his work sooo much, just the way that the sculptures curve and the shine of the wood, it`s just pieced together so perfectly that when you think about it, you do really have to see the pieces in person to appreciate the skill of the piece.
I almost cried when I first saw them, I had no idea that this outdoor exhibition was still on; a few of my friends went to it, but I had no idea that it would still be there when I went up... I`m sure no one saw me almost cry when I first saw them, I know I got really excited and practically ran towards them.
There`s just something about his work that is satisfying but dark to view, the names of the sculptures give a dark undertone to the piece and it`s quite eerie. Something that looks as innocent as a parent protecting a child, can have a name that makes you question as to what the sculptures are really doing, or what scenario they where built to fit into to.
There is no way to describe the work, and you have to see it in front you to then be able to appreciate what it is and how it`s been done.
If you want to see the KAWS outdoor exhibition then it`s at Yorkshire Sculpture Park and ends on the 13th of November.
The walk to the Longside gallery took a veryyyy long amount of time, for starts, me Lucie and Jake fell behind because we wanted to look at all of the KAWS sculptures. The walk was about a mile long and when we got to the field we had to walk up it was ridiculously hot outside, and the field was full of holes and un-cut grass so it was awkward to walk up. By the time we got the top, three other people where stood underneath a tree trying to cool off, so we stood and joined them before walking a bit more up to the gallery... It didn`t have air con inside.
Then after all of that walking, we got the bus back down and round to the main visitors centre... Now here`s my question, why did we have to walk all of that way up when there was a bus service to take us up and down there anyway? We walked all that way, for a ten minute look around and to then just hop onto the bus and go back down the easier way. In fact, we had walked that far, that when I took one last picture I couldn`t actually see where we had started walking from.
Not a lot of sculptures inside of the Longside Gallery interested me that much, all of these things are objects, prints and sculptures that are made of materials that I know I`ll never be able to use or I`ll never have the chance to use.
I`ll be doing an update on the Barbara Hepworth Museum on another day.
If I ever make long updates with a lot of pictures, the text can go funny and paragraphs move around too much, it`s gotten to the point in this one where I just deleted every picture and had to move them all back around again... The only thing with that is that they are seriously jumpy and never stay still unless I spam some clicks.
Stick around for the Barbara Hepworth update!
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