Wakey Wakey

by Ruth Barker, 16 Aug 2011

Hello,

over the weekend I visited the new Hepworth gallery in Wakefield. It was great! I really loved it – as a building and a collection.

There’s a permanent collection of Barbara Hepworth’s work there, which is drawn together by the ‘Hepworth Gift’, a series of working models and drawings showing how work was developed and produced; as well as a temporary exhibition currently by Eva Rothschild. I thought all of it was very well put together, and that the building itself was really gloriously designed, with big windows, generous ceilings, and well proportioned rooms. It was dead busy, too.

Outside I was surprised to see The Black Cloud by Heather and Ivan Morrison, recontextualised but very recognisable. I didn’t get to see the work first hand when it was in Bristol, but I’d heard a lot about it of course, so I was very pleased to discover it in Wakefield, where I could finally have a proper nosey about.

Is this floor new? It’s lovely.

The only reservation I had with the curation is that I hope that the ‘Hepworth in context’ display in Gallery 3 is rehung regularly. It’s great to show the artist’s work in relation to their contemporaries but this is of course a subjective and limited comparison, so it would be great to be able to shuffle this every so often to shed new light on how the work sits within a broader view. A pretty minor quibble though.

More later,

R

STOP PRESS: Just read this on Tom Flynn’s Artknows blog. I’d never even thought about it! If anyone wants to follow this up with an article for PAR+RS – maybe by interviewing Tom about his own invetsigations, just let me know.