Sky Arts spent the last couple of months travelling to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park to find out about the people working there, the original art college that inspired the park’s executive Director, Peter Murray, to start YSP, as well as the range of artists who have since had exhibitions and residencies there.

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The landscape was designed over 200 years ago as a private pleasure ground and for the last 30 years, YSP has used the landscape, vistas and other features to site a range of fascinating exhibitions, commissions and installations. Names such as Anthony Gormley, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Anthony Caro and many others have featured.
Whilst we were filming, the park’s recently built Underground Gallery was housing an extensive exhibition of sculpture and works on paper by artist Peter Randall-Page. Page created the imposing and beautiful seventy ton Seed sculpture for the Eden Project. He has used the large spaces of the Gallery as a catalyst and platform for an ambitious range of work which has extended his practice and given expression to ideas developed over many years. New pieces include a striking, innovative series of wall works in fired clay based on geometry and symmetry, and two monumental Kilkenny limestone carvings.

We also gained an insight into the work of artist Andy Goldsworthy. In 2007 during the park’s 30th anniversary he created three fascinating outdoor pieces that showed the breadth and direction of his work: Hanging Trees, built into one of the estate's historic ha-has, reveals the layered histories of the land and examines the political implications of walled boundaries and the curious creation of a no man’s land between the park and the farming land next door; Shadow Stone Fold remains as a sculpture, shelter and marker of farming activity; and finally the imposing Outclosure in Round Wood physically illustrates the act of making places inaccessible by enclosing a circle of land within a high, dry stone wall.

The park has a great capacity to show work by other types of artist – not just sculptors – And so we also met up with visual artist Rob Ryan and his supporter Sir Paul Smith who unveiled a wonderful exhibition of Ryan’s beautifully detailed paper cut design work. He unveiled a newly commissioned vinyl panel work that now adorns the YSP’s visitor centre.

A highlight of the entire experience going to Blaenau Ffestiniog in North Wales to spend some time with artist and sculptor David Nash. David showed us around his workshop and studio and gave us a fascinating interview talking about his early life, the influence of his family and then talking in detail about his working practice and the philosophies that have guided his work since the 1970’s.
Yorkshire Sculpture Park is now presenting a rich and extensive exhibition of more than 300 works by Nash, tracing the evolution of the artist’s forty year career and offering a vivid statement of his life’s work in his largest ever project.
Nash has developed a unique knowledge of the different properties of wood as an artistic material. In learning to ‘speak the language of wood’ Nash often approaches trees as ‘wood quarries’, using chainsaws to work the trunk, limbs an branches and creates sculpture that will naturally crack and warp as it dries, and which he sometimes burns to a dense, impenetrable mass. The result is a extraordinary body of work that celebrates the artist’s understanding and articulation of his material.

As a permanent commission, Nash has created Black Steps, an ambitious landscape intervention of charred oak and coal.

David Nash Exhibition
29 May 2010 – 27 February 2011
Underground Gallery, Longside Gallery, Bothy & Garden Galleries, Open Air.
A £20 book with texts by Annie Proulx, Ben Tufnell, Sabine Schlenker and Peter Murray, together with a free exhibition leaflet, £5 guidebook, and other merchandise, is available from the YSP shop and at www.shop-ysp.co.uk. In addition, David Nash has created a unique range of multiples available exclusively to YSP.

An Evening with David Nash at Wakefield Theatre Royal
11 June. 8pm. £10, £8, £6.
www.theatreroyalwakefield.co.uk
Call 01924 211311 to book.
Free David Nash Exhibition Tours
Monday to Friday, 2pm (term time).

Exhibition generously supported by Roger Evans and supported by the Henry Moore Foundation and Arts Council England, Yorkshire.

To find out more go to ysp.co.uk