The Perfect Family Day Out at The Hepworth Wakefield
The Hepworth Wakefield is encouraging everyone to immerse themselves in art this summer
The Hepworth Wakefield in the heart of Yorkshire is named after Barbara Hepworth (who was born and brought up in Wakefield). ‘We opened in 2011 and I think no one quite expected how popular the organisation was going to be,’ says deputy director Olivia Colling. ‘It achieved one million visitors way sooner than anyone had imagined it would do [just two and a half years after opening] and I think that was a combination of a really amazing, intriguing building designed by David Chipperfield [Architects], and [the] art collection.’ The Hepworth Wakefield is home to Wakefield’s art collection which contains more than 5,000 works (many of which are the creations of Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore).
‘In 2013 we won the Clore Award for Learning which is one of the biggest prizes for our learning programme – it really recognised the excellence of what we were offering both for casual visitors to the gallery, but also for our schools programmes and the community outreach work that we do,’ Olivia continues. ‘In 2017 we won Art Fund Museum of the Year. At the time, the director of the Art Fund described us as “the museum everyone would dream of having on their doorstep”. I really like that quote because I think it’s how we want people locally to feel – like they’re welcome here, like it’s a space for them. There’s no formal behaviour that’s expected in the gallery – you can just come and have a nice, social time.’
In 2019 The Hepworth Wakefield Garden opened – it’s one of the UK’s largest free public gardens, with an award-winning designer. ‘It’s a properly landscaped garden by Tom Stuart-Smith who has won more medals at Chelsea Flower Show than I can possibly imagine,’ says Olivia. ‘It’s an RHS-standard garden but people don’t have to pay anything to come and enjoy it. That’s been hugely beneficial for us.’
As a charity, The Hepworth Wakefield relies on fundraising. ‘You can have a really great day out by spending time in the garden, visiting the galleries and we always have major temporary exhibitions running alongside exhibitions drawn from Wakefield’s art collection. We also have a fantastic café, whilst families in the summer holidays might prefer to bring their own picnic to enjoy in our picnic area. We have a big learning programme – every weekend (and every day during the school holidays) we have workshops so families can go up to the galleries then down to the studios to enjoy a workshop devised and delivered by a local artist to do something you’d probably never think of doing at home. Or you could take part in Garden Play – an informal setting outside where children can build dens, sculptures or use water to create art on the pathways. We also have Art Pods (facilitated sessions within the galleries) and explore and draw kits and stations so families can do their own self-directed activities. There are drawing and reading materials to encourage people to look at things in different ways and there are objects you can handle (you can’t usually touch the sculptures, so we try to make sure there are materials that people can touch),’ says Olivia.
It’s clear that the team work hard to encourage visitors to engage with Wakefield’s art collection – a public resource. ‘We recently worked on a project with Art Fund called Brainwaves where an artist had work with an EEG [electroencephalogram] headset which you could put on and see how your brainwaves are affected when you look at art,’ says Olivia. ‘The whole campaign proved that art is really good for you. If you can take the time to come and visit an art gallery, there’s a lot of mindfulness and health and wellbeing benefits from that, but it’s also about inspiring a new generation. Wakefield has built up its art collection for the past 100 years and there are some incredible things that people can come and enjoy. The learning team are there to help people find ways into that.
‘The collection, when it was established, was all about collecting art to help people understand modern life. Artists are dealing with big, gritty issues quite often and I think some people come to art galleries to understand what’s going on in their lives perhaps a bit more. Someone I met recently said the best thing they’d ever learned was from looking at art because it had helped them work out something that was challenging in their life that they felt the artist was tackling.’
During the summer holidays The Hepworth Wakefield is open every day. Children always get free entry, but during the summer holidays if they bring a parent/carer with them, that adult gets half price entry. Olivia says there’s a huge range of activities planned across the summer. ‘The Garden Play units will be outside in the garden every day and will be brought inside if the weather doesn’t allow. We also have a huge programme of family workshops,’ she continues. ‘There’ll also be plenty of pop-up activities in the galleries. Any day you come down during the summer holidays, there’ll be something specifically designed for families.’
This summer The Hepworth Wakefield are launching two new major exhibitions – Ronald Moody: Sculpting Life and Igshaan Adams: Weerhoud. ‘Ronald Moody was born in Jamaica and came over to the UK to study dentistry,’ Olivia says. ‘While he was in London he used to visit the British Museum and he was so inspired by the artefacts. That progressed and he became a sculptor and worked at the same sort of time as Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore – he had a 20th century, modernist sculptural style creating huge wooden sculptures. He’s sort of like a re-discovery. For some reason he’s dropped out of our history a little bit so we’re trying to re-position him back where he should be. It’s very rare that all of these artworks have been brought together.
‘Alongside Ronald Moody, we’ve got an artist from South Africa called Igshaan Adams who creates these incredible detailed tapestries and sculptures. For us he’s done some new work which he describes as a “cloud”. They’re made of wire and all of the things he’d recognise growing up (shells and beads) and will be suspended from the ceiling. He talks a lot about using dance and movement to deal with trauma. He’d been working with a company called Garage Dance Ensemble where they covered a sheet of plastic in paint and put a canvas on top and the dancers would move on top of the sheet of plastic and Igshaan would then transform the canvas in his studio into a wall-size tapestry. He talks about it as a way of dealing with identity and the body healing from early traumas. I’d really encourage people to come along and see that because until you see them [in person] you can’t understand how beautiful they are because of the level of detail in them. I think it’ll be quite immersive for visitors to walk through. We’re really excited about showing that.
‘Any day you come down during the summer holidays, there’ll be something specifically designed for families’
‘This year is “Our Year 2024” and Wakefield itself has some amazing events planned. In August they have a dragon puppet coming called The Hatchling which will “hatch” over three days and on the final evening you can watch it take flight. It’s a bit like the War Horse puppet. Our learning teams will be out at those events, so you’ll see The Hepworth Wakefield pop up throughout the district. The other really big event for us is National Playday in August – drop in and all day long there’ll be something really fun to do as a family.’
Looking ahead to autumn, The Hepworth Wakefield is celebrating 100 years since André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto was published with an exhibition of Surrealist landscapes. ‘As well as all the classics, we’ve also got quite a lot of big contemporary commissions in there as well because surrealism hasn’t ever really gone away. It’s something that contemporary artists still respond to now,’ Olivia says. ‘So that’ll be a really exciting exhibition.’ They’re also introducing The Hepworth Wakefield Harvest Festival in September. This new fair will host a selection of exhibitors selling autumn creations, fresh produce and plants. ‘That’s a new market to add to the programme before our really successful Festive Markets are back in November, where you can buy direct from craftspeople and makers from all over the country,’ says Olivia.
The Hepworth Wakefield also have plans to build a new garden workshop and a multi-function space for more horticultural activities, as well as an artist-designed playground, and they also hope to increase their volunteer strand. Olivia promises ‘there are still lots of exciting things to come!’
