We pulled off the M1 to spend some time at the wonderful Yorkshire Sculpture Park on our way back up north recently. If you get the chance to go- take it. Even if you do not ‘get’ big blocks of stone/bronze with cheese holes. There will be plenty more that will intrigue you…

I am addicted to words as my primary means of creative expression. Sure, I like to shape things from wood, but these efforts are not ‘art’. If anything they are therapy, with the wood shaping me as much as the other way round. The  language of sculpture is one that intrigues me, but mostly excludes me. All the more reason to take some time in the midst of the sculpture park. We did not have enough time really- you need days, and we only had a couple of hours. We will return!

The Chinese dissident artist (are all artists not dissidents?) Ai Weiwei was given a space in and around the old estate chapel. His pieces included a room full of chairs and a giant tree cast in iron and loosely bolted together. They told a powerful story, even to a philistine like me, of a culture whose emphasis on the collective to the exclusion of individualism might have become a terrible heresy. The great famines and purges in which hundreds of millions of Chinese people have died or been imprisoned hangs over the art like a cloud.

Some photos;