On Friday 22nd September Year 10 Textiles students took a visit to Yorkshire Sculpture Park. 

Thank you to Year 10 student Eleonora for sharing her views of the trip: 

As a Textiles student, I was very inspired by this trip to see the wonderful work displayed currently in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. The Yorkshire Sculpture Park enables artists to display their work in a place of natural beauty and where the peace and quiet of the countryside allows the art enthusiast to study the art and contemplate its composition, imagery and meaning. 

We started our exploration of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park by looking at an artwork of Leonardo Drew in a chapel. As I walked into the chapel all I could think was “wow”. The artwork was erupting from the walls – the artists had used multiple materials like wood scraps and other decaying items. He had painted them all black. To me, this was incredible as it evoked the feelings of death and decay. It felt like we had stepped into an area which was forgotten and abandoned in contrast to the white of the remaining walls of the chapel. The balance between the black and white was right – it was not too dark that its meaning could not be seen, nor too light.

We then went and looked at a piece of work by Daniel Arsham called “Relics in the landscape”. This consists of multiple statues of things everyone knows well like an astronaut and pikachu (a popular animated character). These statues all had crystals starting to form on the statues which gave the feeling that the statues were being modernised. The crystals made me think of outer space and the continuum that is out there in the universe ever growing, ever evolving into something new.

The last artwork we viewed was particularly tied with our topic of growth and decay. This piece was called “Silence”. This is a building which will in the days, weeks, months and years start to fall apart and decay into the ground little by little. At the moment it has only just started to fall apart and we were still able to walk through. The impact of this work is best appreciated when you walk in silence. The silence makes you focus on what you are seeing, a decaying structure that without sound is slowly ebbing away.  

After this we went to experiment with screen printing with an artist called Sally Gilford. She demonstrated how to do it and then we had a chance to explore this technique ourselves. We used leaves to print onto fabric. No one piece was the same even though we tried to use the same leaves. We all had a lot of fun doing this and learned a new skill. This also inspired various ideas for our coursework into growth and decay. 

We are excited to share that Sally will be visiting Wakefield Girls’ later on in the academic year to deliver a workshop to more Wakefield Girls’ students.