On a blustery hillside near the summit of Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Clare Lilley and I are communing with the landscape. Lilley, YSP’s director and chief curator, has beckoned me through a gate into a piece by the British sculptor Andy Goldsworthy, a drystone wall encircling the trunk of a large lime tree. Inside the enclosure, beneath the tree’s canopy, all we can hear is the shushing of the leaves and the crackle of the wind in the grass. It is cool and tranquil. Then Lilley spots something across the field: a herd of cows is menacing her four-wheel drive. “They like to lick the windows,” she says, then looks at me with genuine concern. “You’re not frightened of cows, are you? We can shoo them out of the way.”
Herding lessons are not on the curriculum at most art schools, but YSP is hardly your average gallery. The largest sculpture park of its kind in Europe, draped across 500 acres of rolling fields, moorland and woods in the hills above Wakefield, it displays more than 100 large-scale pieces and installations, nearly all modern and contemporary. Some of the works are nestled safely inside modest indoor galleries, but most sit in the open air, exposed to everything the Yorkshire climate can throw at them.
