A Mixed Few Days

We’re home again. We went off to Wakefield on Wednesday & came back on Saturday. Just in time it seems, as it snowed yesterday & today. It’s not heavy here but crossing the Pennines might have been more problematical. The Satnav worked well, if at times it seemed to take us the long way round, sticking to motorways wherever possible rather than using A-roads to cut out great loops. Still it got us wherever we wanted.

As for Wakefield it was a mixed event. We stayed at a Premier Inn which was okay rather than exciting. The food was better than it sounded. It was inexpensive &, as such, good value.  But it was pretty basic & we would have appreciated a bit more luxury.

The highlight of the holiday was our visit to the Barbara Hepworth Gallery. The people of Wakefield are privileged to have such a facility that has free entrance. The art was exceptional, especially some of Barbara’s own work. There seems to be many talks & workshops available, most of which were free.

There was also an exhibition of some works by Lynda Benglis, an American artist I hadn’t come across before. Some of her pleated fabric effects were wonderful.

There was also a large painting, “Pontefract Castle” by Alexander Keirincx. It was painted around 1640, which means at the time of the English Civil War. It made you realise how impressive some of the medieval castles still were before Cromwell had so many pulled down. I associate Pontefract Castle as just a ruin.

The other impressive work was an installation by Toby Ziegler. It included a plaster frieze by Charles Sargeant Jagger entitled “No Man’s Land”, which captured some of the horror of the First World War. This was balanced by a silvery white canvas of the same dimension. It was a bit like looking at a Rothko painting. At first you just saw the silvery colour, but the longer you looked the more you saw in it, echoing some of Jagger’s frieze. Then came a huge cardboard foot, a sort of abstraction of a dismembered foot in Jagger’s work. And finally a 3D printer that was producing endless Newell teapots.

On Friday we decided to go to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. En route we stopped at Blackerhall Farm for some breakfast. It’s clearly a very popular place, for good reason too. The home-made cakes looked delicious. They used their own farm produce wherever possible. The café was in a converted barn. It looked so light & airy, with enormous old beams. There was also a farm shop there which, if we were local, would certainly be a place I would want to go for meat & vegetables. We did contemplate calling in again on our way home to buy a meat pie for our evening meal at home, but in the end we just wanted to get home so didn’t bother.

We went on to the Sculpture Park. What a disappointment it was! The images we’d seen on-line looked fabulous. When we first arrived we were full of optimism. The few sculpture on the roadside had potential. The high price of the car park was off-putting. Nonetheless we went on in. I was relieved to see I could hire an electric mobility scooter so the Fox wouldn’t have to push me up & down the hill. Armed with the map provided we set off. We soon felt we were wasting our time. I was rapidly becoming blue with cold. The Fox’s hip was playing up but there was nowhere for him to sit down to recover. The map was useless. The works weren’t labelled well. Most were in the midst to rolling greenness, but I had been told to keep to hard paths with my scooter so I couldn’t get anywhere near them to see them properly. The Fox spent much of his time traipsing through mud. We didn’t stay long & left disgruntled, feeling we’d been had. We tried to convince ourselves that on a warm sunny day maybe we could have enjoyed it more. As it was our interest only really picked up when we came across a mass of snowdrops, when we came across some geese down by the lake, & when we saw blue tits squabbling. And none of those were part of the exhibition, just Nature’s little addition. We left.

After a lunch-break, we decided to go on to the Wakefield itself Again another place we found a mix of good & bad. Undeniably the highlight was the cathedral which did much to restore our equanimity. It’s a curious mixture of old & new. I loved the labyrinth drawn in the nave floor. The idea is to go round the maze in prayer & so discover the restorative effect of the journey & an increased ability to take on life. The 1661 font has recently been re-gilded, echoing the gold on the figures on the Rood Screen. There were so many corners of interest. As for the rest of Wakefield we saw little of interest. The shops failed to excite.

No, for us the trip was a mixed event. The cathedral & Hepworth Gallery – wonderful, the Sculpture Park & city - generally poor. However we did feel the trip had been worthwhile. Would we go again? Probably not, though if there was a special exhibition on at the Gallery, especially if we were nearby, possibly. We did feel the break did us good & can’t help thinking we should have more few days away.  We’ve coming back feeling refreshed.