[Re]construct at Yorkshire Sculpture Park
Polly Checkland Harding
Aptly housed in Yorkshire Sculpture Park‘s beautiful 18th century Chapel, [Re]construct is an exhibition that explores the flexible boundary between architecture and sculpture. The works on show, largely selected from the Arts Council Collection, make our ideas of materiality malleable, with artist Alex Chinneck having apparently melted a hole in a brick wall that is, in fact, made from wax, and the Turner Prize winning artist Martin Creed manipulating one of the walls of the Chapel itself so that a protrusion appears to have grown organically from the white painted plaster, both natural-seeming and incongruous.
Visitors are encouraged to question the hierarchy of materials through Susan Collin’s Untitled (Rawl Plugs) series, for which the artist has meticulously re-created plastic rawlplugs, used to fix screws into the wall, from semi-precious onyx, resulting in minor interruptions of the Chapel space that might easily go overlooked. Cornelia Parker’s Neither From Nor Towards, on the other hand, takes up a central position; this seminal work was created using bricks from a set of houses that subsided into the sea when the cliffs they were built on eroded, which have been hung individually from the ceiling to form the rudimentary shape of a house.
It’s an exhibition that sets out to complicate our ideas around the structures we live our lives in, deconstructing a sense of permanence whilst simultaneously creating something new.
