Metamorphoses at the Sculpture Park

I love the Yorkshire Sculpture Park and probably spend far too much money there; parking, eating in the cafe, buying postcards in the gift shop. It was at its best on Saturday. Bright and blustery at 10.30 in the morning and the car parks were already filling up with sculpture vultures.

My husband was my walking partner and we decided to go round via the visitor centre, starting with the terrace that looks out over the rolling parkland and up to the Longside Gallery. Lots of lovely smells from the wisteria and lilac that festoon the terrace made it a delightful few yards and we saw a rabbit nibbling the grass near the pond, obviously waiting there to introduce the animal theme for the next couple of hours. Walking down the hillside to the stable block car park the trees impress, especially one lime, that judging by the circumference of its knotted, gnarled trunk, must have been there for a couple of hundred years.

Beside the camellia house the first of the sculptures we had come to see was huge and surprising, a giant seated female nude, with a hare’s head. Literally half human, half hare, it was split down the middle and looked over towards more figures under the trees of hare/humans, dogs and horses in groups, all by the sculptor Sophie Ryder. It was like walking into a scene from ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ or ‘Alice in Wonderland’. The spreading, layered trees in this part of the park contributed to the mysterious, magical quality of the sculptures that is lacking from some of the more geometric and abstract installations. Close up, you can see that the metal that the figures are cast in has the impressions of plugs and cogs, which adds to their texture in a completely non-pastoral way.

The brown and black geese graze down on the lawns near the lakes amongst the daisies and speedwells. Walk past them and you can hear the plucking noise they make as they tear the grass. They’re not too bothered about people. I found a sketch book left in the roots of one of the trees, with the name of the young artist and the words ‘David Hockney’ inside it, as well as a nice new black and yellow striped pencil underneath it. No one was around to claim it and I think a child on a study visit must have left it there, so I put it back. I kept the pencil though, I can’t resist a shiny new pencil and it’s not the first time I’ve found one in the sculpture park.

We crossed the upper lake on the Cascade Bridge, looking for the herons on the island in the lower lake, but the trees on the island had too much foliage so their nests were hidden. I noticed lots of Lady’s Bedstraw in the grass beside the path, which is a delicate green and yellow creeping plant that’s supposed to smell nice when it’s dried. We began to walk up the hill, with a field of green barley on our left rippling in the wind that was swirling down from the direction of Oxley Bank. The cattle in the field were resting in the sunshine, ignoring the people who traipsed past them. One of the sculptor Sophie Ryder’s wire drawings was suspended from a frame over the path. It was in the form of a huge eye and swung in the gusts. The cattle ignored that too. We overtook an older man with a stick who was battling up the hill with his grandson beside him.
The wire sculptures in the Longside Gallery are made of wire and there are also chalk and charcoal drawings on the same theme: metamorphosed hare women. Wire would seem to be a difficult medium to use to create sculptures; it’s like three dimensional scribbling. Sophie Ryder uses it so accurately to create details, like the folds in a hare’s ear. She has also created some wall hangings, rather like felt only in hard wire, of a dog’s feet. They are much bigger than life size and emphasise the claws and pads of the creature. My favourite was a huge hare that was sliced into pieces, so the viewer can squeeze inside to see other little hares in apses inside, rather like a Russian doll.

Continuing on the circular route we set off for Round Wood past some hawthorne bushes so laden with blossom they looked like clumps of snow were weighting their branches. The wood conceals an Andy Goldsworthy dry stone circle within it. It’s very mysterious, because you can’t see inside it and today it was glowing pink in the sunlight filtering through the trees. Walking up onto Oxley Bank the full blast of the wind hit us, shooting straight over from the M1. There is a row of big beech trees there and the wind was making them roar like the traffic on the motorway, in fact I couldn’t tell how much was the gusts and how much was the cars zooming away in the distance. The smooth silvery trunks of the trees seem to have invited people to carve their names on them and several were dated in the 60s. It made me think of tattoos on old people, distorted and faded statements from the past. More Andy Goldsworthy enclosures have been built into the boundary walls up here and you can see into these; they have tree trunks embedded in them.

Descending through the wood we met several groups of people coming round the other way. A couple, with the man carrying a baby in a papoose, ducked under the flailing branches. My theory about meeting people twice on a satisfying walk was proved again as they were to be amongst the people we saw again at the end of the walk as they marched up the hill towards the visitor centre. The bluebells were nearly finished here and there was no trace of scent from them. We soon came to the bottom and had a quick look at the gloomy little well built into a small quarry before crossing the dam at the end of the Lower Lake. A man was standing amongst the rushes at the edge, fishing.

Coming back out into the Country Park we saw families of geese with goslings grazing beside the little sluice that runs beside the lake and then toiled up the hill past the Skyspace. A cup of coffee and a piece of flapjack from the cafe seemed inevitable. Sitting on the balcony watching the people coming up the hill was a calorific way to end a good walk.