hepworth

Yorkshire major new art gallery, opening spring 2011.

I'm thrilled to be appointed as a creative practitioner at The Hepworth Wakefield. We will be responsible for inventing, developing and delivering the educational and outreach programmes in the gallery. I'll be working on primary, secondary, post 16 and family learning programmes and can't wait to get started. This is the first time I've had the opportunity to build from scratch, there is NOTHING in place - it is truly up to us.

The gallery is due to open in May 2011 and last week we had our first team meaning and got to see the building in progress and the 10 rooms that make up the gallery. It was a real privilege to see the empty spaces, some with work already installed. We got an insight into the story the rooms will tell of Barbara Hepworth's work, legacy and the role she played on an international stage. We got to see the building as sculpture, it's light, scale and angles. The slopping roofs mirror and comment on the factory buildings around and about and the buildings surface is cleverly designed to become darker when wet, a purple hue that reflects and responds to the moods of the sky and landscape that surround it. Rooms 7 to 10 will be dedicated to three contemporary temporary exhibitions per year, and I know who the artists are - whoop!

Beyond The Hepworth the land is a building site, I enjoyed seeing it in its transformative state, it felt provisional, unfinished, unpolished, the earth trudged up and suiting the cold static of winter. When The Hepworth opens in the spring this earth will be landscaped and grassed, with a zip wire, picnic area, community stage and lots of space for our art activities which we plan to take beyond the building.

chocolate eclair

After my first interview in a long time I amused myself while waiting for the return train to Sheffield by idly finding a rude word in Scunthorpe. This is something I do, look at signs and mentally remove or add letters to make them vulgar - I didn't have to try too hard on this one.

Once on the train I sat next to an elderly gentleman who began to tell me how the scenes flying past the window were so different from his youth, it was the emptiness that he commented on telling me that as a boy and young man the fields would have been full of working folk, a landscape teeming with people. I found this fascinating and profoundly sorrowful all at once. He told me of memories of war, of landing in France, of his friends who had been killed and his time as a student in Oxford - the time of his life apparently! I'd assumed he was in his 80's when he began to talk but he told me he was 99 years old, 100 on 15th December 2010.

I've often thought about him since and how he let me into his world. His memories projected onto the fields revealed a missing, a lack for him, when to me the fields were as they had always been. Now they are not and I think of his view. The past is always present, memories haunt landscapes, cityscapes, interiors, the everyday and unremarkable only visible from our vantage point of now. Today will one day look dated and strange to us, to others, what we will miss is still unknown.

He got off in Doncaster, I got up to let him into the aisle, he didn't say goodbye. I don't think it mattered to him who I was, anyone with ears would do but I felt privileged to sit next to him. I shuffled over to his seat, watched him become part of the crowd and disappear. At my feet were a pile of chocolate eclair wrappers, a remnant of his presence and I smiled as internally I reprimanded him for not putting them in the bin. 

I didn't get the job and that doesn't matter, I'm just glad it allowed me to be in the right place at the right time.