Tech Age Sculptures

After seeing the Ice Age sculptures in the British Museum, we took a long ride up to Yorkshire on Monday to visit the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Lots of good stuff there, but a lot of suspect stuff too. I found a wacking great fairground type whirligig with toilets on the end of poles a bit too tacky for my taste. It may be art but I don't have to like it. Also I do wonder why most modern sculptors feel they have have to always do abstract works these days. In the whole park of many many sculptures there were only a handful of works that represented something you instantly recognised. There was a statue by Gormley that I pointed to and said to Annette, 'Hey, that's a bloke, isn't it!' The artist I did like, a lot, was Yinka Shonibare. The picture above is entitled 'Alien Man on a Flying Machine'. Now aliens are right down my artistic alley. He had a gallery of figures in bright colourful patchwork costumes - soldiers firing canons, dancers, aliens, headless strollers - I think the set was called 'Fabric-ation' - and they made you smile as well as saying something important about love, life and the universe. Now I'm not against artists like Henry Moore, who is a wonderful sculptor. I just love stroking and touching his beautifully polished lumps of granite and marble, always so smooth and receptive to my tactile nature. But do applaud any new sculptor like Yinka who produces something that makes my day glitter and glint a bit more, especially after I've lost or had stolen my bank card and have developed a Yorkshire head cold (I haven't been back to the county of my birth for a long time, but this one waited patiently all through the years and pounced on me as soon as I crossed the border).