Our visit to Yorkshire Sculpture Park!

For those of you who haven't yet been to Yorkshire Sculpture Park, it's definitely worth a visit. They are a charity based in West Yorkshire and a fantastic family day out. They even welcome your furry friends onsite (as long as they're kept on a lead and don't go too near the sheep and lambs roaming the grounds!)

The charity is free to visit, although you do have to pay for parking onsite which contributes to the upkeep of the grounds.

Onsite, in the extensive grounds, there are numerous impressive statues and art pieces to keep you entertained as you walk around. They have visiting exhibitions throughout the year so usually there's something new to find (depending how often you visit!) We visited in April 2023 and were lucky to find two exhibitions on show.

The first was "Daniel Arsham: Relics in the Landscape" which is showing now until March 2024. According to their website - the Yorkshire Scuplture Park is the first UK museum display of work by the highly acclaimed North American artist Daniel Arsham. He says about the work "as history progresses, all objects become antiquated and in some way, they all become ruins or relics, disused or buried. In 1000 years everything that we own will inevitably become one of those things. I don’t particularly see that as having an apocalyptic quality – it’s sort of just the march of time moving on." The kids genuinely were impressed with the work - although it's probably fair to say that the Pokemon was by far the favourite with the kids!

There were also four statues by Damien Hirst on show and that exhibition is running now until September 2024. According to the website, this statue is The Virgin Mother which is 10 metres tall and is partly inspired by the historic sculpture Little Dancer of Fourteen Years (c.1881), by Edgar Degas. It was certainly an impressive statue although I'm not sure the kids liked it very much!

Alongside all of the statues on site, there's a cafe, a museum and a gift shop (although we didn't try again of them because we had the dogs with us!

All in all we spent about an hour and a half wandering round but if we'd visited any of the other areas or taken a picnic we would have been happy to stay a lot longer! All in all a lovely day out for the family and a great way to get some exercise, while keeping the kids entertained! We'll be back again soon!

Thanks for reading,

Katie x