Girls in the Wind

'Girls in the Wind' may have been on display at The Hepworth for a while but I'd never noticed it before. A small bronze sculpture by Betty Rea (1904-1965), it depicts two young friends, their hair and clothes blown by the wind. I liked the liveliness and movement in it, which contrasted with the heavy feel of the bronze itself. 

Rea studied at the Royal College of Art and stayed faithful to figurative work when others were moving towards abstract modernism. In an art world largely dominated by men, these depictions of women by a female artist have a significant place. 

The ethereal sculpture below attracted me. Called 'Double Vision' and created by Leeds-born artist Caroline Broadbent, it is made of nylon and explores duality and liminal space. The dress is a metaphor for the person, the meeting point for the inside with the rest of the world. 

Wakefield windows

I had a trip to The Hepworth in Wakefield with a friend just before Christmas. I wanted to see an exhibition that included some of David Hockney's early work and, anyway, it's a while since I'd visited, there's a great café and it was chance to catch up on news with a good friend. We enjoyed ourselves, though it's arguable that both of us would have come away with better photos had we not been distracted by chatting!

As always, the building itself excites me as much as the work on show. It's all about light and shadow, with some wonderful views from the windows. In the photo above, I managed to frame the spire of Wakefield Cathedral in one of the characteristic holes in a huge Barbara Hepworth sculpture.

Below is a striking hand-painted bronze sculpture by Rebecca Warren. I think it's a representation of a human form, though to me it just looked lumpy! I liked the colouring and patina though - and I loved its juxtaposition with the glowing golden branches of the willow tree outside.

The sculpture was more attractive in close-up. I could see a face (perhaps an angel) in this bit, though it wasn't meant to be a face.

The Hepworth Garden

Opposite The Hepworth in Wakefield is a fascinating old red-brick Victorian mill building. I'm not sure what it's used for now (if anything) but the two so different buildings are a wonderful foil for each other, both very strong in their lines and shapes. In between is a large, open space that has hitherto been no more than a strip of grass. They are now in the process of transforming it into 'one of the UK's largest free public gardens' (though how it deserves that title, I'm not exactly sure).

The garden has been designed by Tom Stuart-Smith, an acclaimed landscape designer with eight Gold Medal winning gardens at the Chelsea Flower Show on his CV. He specialises in combining naturalism and modernity, using sweeps of planting within a defined framework. 

The hard landscaping is well underway, some large trees have been installed and the first small area appeared ready for planting. It's all supposed to be finished by summer 2019, so I look forward to watching it as it develops and matures.

Shown right is an artists' impression of what the garden will look like when complete.

Hepworth light and shade series

I absolutely adore the main stairwell within The Hepworth gallery in Wakefield. It has hidden skylights and slate cladding, which emphasise all the angles and lines, giving wonderful highlights and shadows. I always stop to take photos of it; the subtle differences in light really interest me.

Even the lockers along the corridor (where people can leave their bags if they're too big to carry around the galleries) make for an interesting study in the right light.

Beautiful things

Here are a few more precious and beautiful objects from the Magdalene Odundo exhibition that I liked:

a reworked linen ruff,

a cute little gold alloy duck, that would have been a finial for a staff, dated between AD 500-1600, from the Sinú culture in Colombia,

a small Barbara Hepworth sculpture made of pink stone, called 'Mother and Child'.  It was made in 1934, when Hepworth was expecting her own triplets.

Magdalene Odundo

Kenyan-born Magdalene Odundo OBE is one of the world's most esteemed ceramic artists. I went along to The Hepworth in Wakefield to catch her exhibition 'The Journey of Things', and what a treat it was. There were a number of her own pieces, alongside other historic and contemporary objects that she has chosen to illustrate the influences on her work. There's a good review HERE.

I loved the burnished terracotta vases above. She builds the pots, not on a wheel but by constantly walking around them and shaping them by hand. Then she adds a slip glaze and fires them, with subtle and unpredictable results.
"I work very slowly. I think a lot. I work on pieces like a sculptor. I form, I model, I remodel."

The porcelain 'Three Ashed Bottles' below are by Gwyn Hanssen Pigott (1935-2013), an acclaimed Australian ceramic artist. I adored their simple lines and the crackled glaze.

The pot above is by Odundo, whereas the one below, dated to about 1900, is a traditional pot made and used by the Nupe people of Nigeria, whom she cites as one of her greatest inspirations. She explores the connection between pottery and womanhood in many African cultures; women make and use the pots, and there are associations with the fertility of earth and the female body's ability to serve as a vessel for a child.

I'm not always wildly excited about ceramics, but I did like these very much - such simple, strong shapes. It was also very interesting to see the other objects she had chosen to display and to trace connections and her 'journey' as an artist.

The Hepworth (again)

I made another visit to The Hepworth gallery in Wakefield to see an exhibition. After being a little unsure at first as to whether I liked its architecture, over the years I've come to view it as a most exciting building, uncompromising in its starkness and yet full of subtle light and shade, both within and without. For once, it was quite a decent day for photos, though the brightest light is always behind its 'best side'. Somehow, it always manages to look more like an architect's drawing than an actual, real building. (Click the 'Hepworth' label below for posts I've done about it in the past.)

Light and shade

I spent a happy few minutes taking photos in the stairwell at The Hepworth. Crafted in various shades of grey slate and lit by skylights, it has some wonderful angles and an intriguing play of light and shade.

Hepworth at The Hepworth

The sculptor Barbara Hepworth (1903 -1975) was born and educated in Wakefield, although she famously belonged to the St. Ives artistic colony in Cornwall, along with her husband Ben Nicholson. (I was impressed to learn that she continued to work despite having triplets in 1934, as well as a son by a previous marriage!) The Hepworth gallery was built in 2011 to house the City of Wakefield's art collection and provide a legacy for the sculptor. It holds a large collection of her work: sculptures, paintings and sketches; tools and archives, along with many other works by significant British artists of the 20th century, including that other famous Yorkshire-born sculptor Henry Moore.

I particularly liked the bronze cast of Dame Barbara's left hand - her 'thinking hand', as she called it. My eye was also caught by this grouping of larger sculptures (below), in different materials; solid and yet fluid and tactile.

Some of her work marries bronze or stone with intricate stringing or wires. I enjoyed the play of light and shade in them.

Hopping to The Hepworth

I can be in Wakefield by train in less than an hour and then it's just a short hop from Kirkgate station to The Hepworth art gallery. I wanted to catch an exhibition of work by the artist and photographer Lee Miller (1907-1977), an American fashion model and later photographer and photojournalist, who became involved with the Surrealist movement. She worked at one time with Man Ray (and was his lover, I think) and eventually settled in the UK during the turbulent years of WWII. 'Lee Miller and Surrealism in Britain' showed some of her work alongside the work of other artists prominent in the Surrealist movement, and her photos of them. It was interesting rather than 'likeable'. Some of her most famous photos are rather shocking: a severed human breast on a plate, and Miller herself in Hitler's bathtub on the day his suicide was announced. But I did like the abstracted nudes, particularly one of a woman's back, reminiscent of a cello. (Sadly, photography not allowed in the exhibition.)

The gallery itself is very photogenic, inside and out, in a Brutalist sort of way. It's like a sculpture in itself.

Designed by David Chipperfield in 2011, it sits alongside the River Calder. From the huge windows, it has breathtaking views that you come upon almost unexpectedly as you wander through the galleries.

Next door is this striking old Victorian mill building. There are plans for a new public garden to be designed by Tom Stuart-Smith, to occupy the space between.

'Common Sense'

Everything in The Hepworth is worth seeing but I especially went along to view the current exhibition of the photographer Martin Parr's work. It is entitled 'The Rhubarb Triangle and other stories'. At its heart is a new commission of photographs of the famous 'rhubarb triangle', an area near Wakefield that specialises in growing the sweet and delicate Yorkshire forced rhubarb, grown in dark sheds and harvested by candlelight. Alongside were many of Martin's other photographs, among them his documentary series focussing on the seaside and the middle classes in the 80s. If you don't know his work, do look him up. He manages to be both funny and poignant, and some of his images are a scathing commentary on life in Thatcher's Britain towards the end of the twentieth century.

The wonderful collage shown above is called 'Common Sense' - highly saturated images of 'bits and bobs' of life in the 90s, wonderfully kitsch and quite bizarre but somehow a fascinating archive.
The four people were watching a video about Martin Parr, listening through headphones. Every now and again they'd all guffaw with laughing, which added to the slightly odd feeling, since you didn't know what they were laughing at.

Picture window 2

There used to be a children's programme that started with a house with lots of differently shaped windows. The cameras would zoom in through one of them.... 'let's look through the round window'.  All the windows in the Hepworth, Wakefield, are uniformly rectangular but the view though each could not be more different. This is on the opposite side of the building from yesterday, looking through the graceful willow trees that someone commented on on my photo of the outside of the gallery. The River (Calder, I think) flows past and there is a small boatyard so the boats and buoys provide a bit of muted colour and interest.

Picture window

Still not well, though recovering, I have been looking over some of the photos I took in Wakefield. This is the view from one of the huge windows in The Hepworth. They are 'picture windows' in the best sense of the word. They give visitors to the gallery an extraordinary sense that the views outside are very much part of what one is meant to be appreciating, as much as the sculpture inside. In this case the framed subject is an old mill (which I think they are going to convert to residential use) and the oddly-shaped timber structure, which did not appear to have much purpose except possibly as a rain shelter.  It reminded me of a mammoth or some kind of huge beetle. Quite dramatic.

Lightbox

Another composition in shades of grey - this is the light-well above the staircase in The Hepworth, Wakefield.  Again, more or less straight out of camera, just tweaked a little to get rid of a slight yellowish tinge from the lighting.

Fifty shades...

The inside of The Hepworth is, to me, even more beguiling than the outside - stark and minimalist, clad in fifty shades of grey. This is one of the stairwells, more or less straight out of camera. The walls are lined with smooth grey slate. Perhaps people thought I was a little odd, taking photos of the stairs... but I was reminded of our innate British middle-class politeness, as time and again people hung back so as not to get in the way of my picture. (They don't realise how long it takes me, faffing about to get it right!)

Brooding across the water

The Hepworth, Wakefield, is a series of trapezoidal blocks, lit by a few huge windows in the walls and skylights in the roof. It is clad with self-compacting pigmented concrete and is designed to look very sculptural itself. I think it's one of those brutalist buildings you either love or hate, and to be honest I'm not sure whether I like it or not. It's a very minimalist building, quite dour on a grey winter's day. Yet as a photographer I was drawn to it... it asks to be photographed, and presents a challenge. I felt I wanted to go back to it several times in different lights and seasons. The backlight was all wrong for this view, resulting in the facade looking quite flat when it is actually very angular. But, even so, it has a mood...

The Hepworth

The Hepworth, Wakefield, is a new art gallery opened in May 2011. Designed by David Chipperfield, it forms part of the "Yorkshire Sculpture Triangle", which also incorporates The Henry Moore Institute in Leeds and the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. It is named after the sculptor Barbara Hepworth, who was born and educated in Wakefield. It houses some of her work, as well as showcasing many other artists and sculptors through an ongoing series of temporary exhibitions of contemporary art. It also displays pieces from Wakefield's art collection. It has a very nice café too!