Wakefield is the centre of sculpture in Britain. Take a trip to the birthplace of Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth and you’ll find yourself in a world of three-dimensional art: 10 graceful galleries of carvings and castings by these artists alongside many European masterpieces at the Hepworth Wakefield; standing-stone sculptures dot the green fields of the nearby Yorkshire Sculpture Park; plenty of buses to the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds.
In addition, there is a constantly changing programme of new exhibitions in which sculpture plays such an important role that anyone wishing to delve into this art form, particularly that of the last 100 years, will find it most concentrated in these few square miles of Yorkshire.
One of this year’s most anticipated sculpture exhibitions, for example, brings together the widely-distributed works of the Jamaican-born artist Ronald Moody (1900-84) first in full force at the Hepworth Wakefield. Small portrait heads in wood and bronze of giant figures such as Paul Robeson and Harold Moody, the artist’s brother, founder of the League of Coloured Peoples, are all concentrated personalities. Hieratic figures in stone and oak unite the ancient past with Moody’s present in a startling visual poetry.
His art spans the 20th century, from the Caribbean island where he was born to London, with a period in 1930s modernist Paris, always with a persistent and vital figuration. The show opens with a philosophical vision: a double-sided human head positioned in the embracing embrace of a serpentine form resting on an animal’s leg and curling into a bird’s beak. Atavistic, yet lucidly modern in its fiberglass resin, the work is titled Man… His Universe.
Moody worked with wood to mesmerizing effect from the 1920s onwards, using the grain to introduce undulating movement into the female form. Several figures, all titled Annieseem to exist in dappled light, or even underwater currents. The heads are often slightly tilted, with the most delicate curvature of eye and eyelid to suggest an attitude of joyful thought.
Busty and muscular, short and stocky, these figures are all compressed strength, even when they’re small enough to be picked up by the neck. A glorious head of Moody’s niece is not much bigger than a child’s fist, her vibrant personality in a nutshell. Not much taller is a man with an inward smile, his arms tight at his hardwood sides, in nothing more than a sarong: Moody’s incarnation of a priest.
There are Caribbean deities: witty and quixotic creatures in bronze. Here is Savacou, a mythological bird responsible for wind and thunder, who will later turn into a star, with a brilliantly onomatopoeic head: shaped like the sound of a scream. Moody’s enormous 7ft version, cast in aluminium, still stands outside the University of the West Indies in Mona, its name the same as that of the 1970s Caribbean Artists Movement magazine edited by Edward Kamau Brathwaite.
Related: Dentist, modernist, activist: the many lives of sculptor Ronald Moody
Perhaps the most pan-global, even ecumenical, of all the sculptures here is Moody’s towering Johanan from 1936 (purchased by the Tate almost 60 years later). Named after John the Baptist, this elm torso is strangely androgynous, swelling and undulating, shot through with the wood’s glittering contours. The face has an inscrutable pharaonic expression, the body something of a beatific Buddha. Moody visited the British Museum in 1928, five years after arriving in England (originally to train as a dentist), and was mesmerized, as he recalled, by “the enormous inner power … the ineradicable movement in silence” he found there. It is precisely what the best of his own work possesses.
If this show sometimes makes it hard to separate Moody from his many influences and colleagues – objects from the British Museum, various artworks by other CAM members – it is worth examining it slowly and carefully. Moody’s art is powerfully good-natured, and Hepworth Wakefield brings his humanity, in all its forms, powerfully back into the light.
A parallel exhibition by the South African artist Igshaan Adamsin the adjacent galleries, has as much soul and even more beauty. Adams (b. 1982) takes tapestry and transforms it into clouds, landscapes, rhythmic interweavings, even human figures. He is the most magical and inventive of all the textile artists working today.
A shower of open warps, in silvery rope, glitters with a weather of shiny beads, pearls, shells and stone chips to bring you straight into a torrent. A waterfall of nylon rope, small dark elements trapped in it, suggests both crisis and waterfall. An extraordinarily complex structure of lace, cotton thread, fine chains and small jewels, suspended and emerging from the wall, folds and bends and seems to open its two arms wide. Oh dear – grandmother – that’s what it’s called.
You look at and into each spectacular thicket and web. And above you, across the gallery, hang dust clouds and swirls that look as light as a feather but as weighty as a meteor shower. Danger and memory are captured in their astonishing invention, from fuse wire and lamp filaments, shower heads and silk threads, sharp clips and plastic bands. They hold color and shape as vaguely as real clouds, but are spun from Adams’ imagination and ingenuity, his art of living dreams.
In Yorkshire Sculpture Park, a few miles away, the British-Indian artist exhibits Bharti Kher (born 1969) has placed colossal porcelain figurines in the landscape – or so it seems. In fact, these curious goddesses are bronze casts of broken clay objects, reconfigured in new ways. A girl fits into a woman, 23 children’s heads sprout from a mother goddess, and a female musician transforms into her own tambourine. Late-blooming surrealism meets Asian tradition.
In the underground galleries, the viewer is surrounded by a stately space of ultramarine stones. The Deaf Room is made from 10 tons of glass bangles, commemorating the infamous 2002 Gujarat riots, in which over 1,000 people were killed and women were raped and burned. White bindis bloom over broken mirrors like ice flowers in Milk tooth and a monolith of old radiators, entitled The hot winds that blow from the west, looks like a pile of bleached bones: look twice, think again, be careful.
Kher’s hybrid art ranges from antlered women to cow-headed goddesses to baboon-faced self-portraits. We are mythical creatures, always part animal for her. Everything has a backstory – the crashed ambulance she encountered outside her London studio and crushed to pieces; the saris her mother sold in Streatham, now painted with resin and draped like molten glass, in one case completely obscuring the figure beneath, a reference to Pakistan’s assassinated leader Benazir Bhutto.
Sometimes the indication is clear and lyrical; at other times, as in Cloudwalkerwhich refers to the Dakini dancers of Tibetan mythology, completely opaque. But when form and content come together perfectly, no texts are needed. The thin red line that runs the entire length of the YSP galleries, just above your head, glows in the sunlight of the day. It is an artery of glass bracelets: a beautiful female bloodline.
Star Ratings (out of five)
Ronald Moody: Sculpting Life ★★★★
Igshaan Adams: Resistance ★★★★★
Bharti Kher: Alchemy ★★★