It’s a two-kilometre walk from the main area of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, over bridges, through gates, across open fields, to get to the Longside Gallery. I walked it today because the Andy Goldsworthy exhibition continued over there, and (as you’ll understand if you’ve read any of my previous blogs about his work) I was keen not to miss any of it.
Slogging uphill into heavy rain made harsher by a high cross wind, I was forced to appreciate the unsubtle difference between a sculpture park and a gallery. Approaching the only place of shelter in the Longside fields I found the space occupied by a sheltering herd of cows, through whose breath and muck I had to closely manoeuvre. Dripping wet and treading filth into the exhibition room, and noticing that this was not being frowned upon but accepted by others present, I remembered that I was here to see the creations of a man who works entirely with natural materials, attempting to align himself with natural processes as he does that work, and recalling that to Goldsworthy, nature means red in tooth and claw, cow shit, deer blood and all.
This was driven home to me almost immediately as I approached the beautiful snaking line across the window covering the entire length of the gallery, through which could be seen the sodden route I’d just walked, and the cattle still trying to keep dry beneath those trees, and it was obvious how he’d created it by its unambiguous title, Cow dung on glass. I looked around the room and realised that every artwork here had in fact been created by animal or human crap of some sort – the many sheep paintings, created by sheep walking on a canvas over periods of time, and the blood drawings, made by hanging a cadaverous creature over a canvas, or splashing or trailing its blood, or mixing it with ice and letting it melt onto the canvas and dry.
Goldsworthy’s work seems very Yorkshire to me. Unsentimental, rooted in the earth. Like the folks who work the fields above and the coalfields beneath this part of this massive county. Goldsworthy spent his formative years in suburban Leeds, on the edge between urban and rural, and worked on a farm from the age of thirteen. His work is instructive for my walk because it’s concerned with revealing the processes by which we interact with the given environment. In an interview in the exhibition book Goldsworthy describes how as a child living in a newly-built house he felt profoundly effected by the relationship between the city and the countryside: ‘Beneath that veneer of tarmac, I felt the swamp was still there.’
His work is empowering for my walk because I feel it draws me closer to nature as I engage with it – treading in the muck on my shoes which Goldsworthy will add to the ever-growing Mud ball he’s making in the Longside Gallery, thrilling at the skill, sensitivity, deep patience and pure inventiveness which went into the making of the twelve-metre wide screen made of leaf stalks pinned together by blackthorns, standing pressing my back and cranium against the large arches he has created from large red, entirely self-supporting, sandstone blocks. It helps me to remember that beneath the tarmac the swamp is still there: to consider the significances in that.
There’s something quite manly, not macho but humanly tough, genuinely physical, about the Goldsworthy approach, which rubs off on you. So it felt ok to have been soaked, walking through cow muck and very close to the steaming backsides of the cows themselves to get there. It felt good and appropriate, after spending time with all those blood drawings, to be warmed inside by the venison pie served to me at the YSP restaurant. Goldsworthy the Yorkshireman does a lot of work with black holes and I think there’s a lot in his work which is appreciated by the sorts of tough Yorkshiremen who’ve spent their lives working down black holes, in pits and quarries and steelworks.
I shall hope to return to this exhibition before it ends next January, though, because I missed some of Goldsworthy’s furthest-flung outside works today. I could have got over to see them but it would have meant trudging a few more kilometres over fields, and it was raining, after all.