Everyday rituals and living materials: two new exhibitions at Yorkshire Sculpture Park – Interview

Louise Lockhart Garden Collage Screen Print 2025. Image Credit: Louise Lockhart.

Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP), the largest sculpture park in Europe and the leading international centre for modern and contemporary sculpture, is currently refreshing its collections in preparation for its 50th anniversary in 2027. Two of the new exhibitions in their massive year-long programme all about big ideas are ‘Cake Crumbs and Lemonade’ (running from 8 March until 28 June) and ‘Time’s Scythe’ (opening on 28 March and running until 27 September). Together, the two foreground the dynamic relationship between art and human experience. TSOTA spoke to creators Louise Lockhart and Nicola Turner about their exhibitions at YSP, discussing inspirations, planning, execution and more.

Just freshly opened, ‘Cake Crumbs and Lemonade’ is the largest solo exhibition to date by renowned illustrator and designer Louise Lockhart from Hebden Bridge. Recounting her family outings, Louise says that YSP has “always been there as a place to have a lovely family day out where art takes centre stage”, and she feels lucky to have had such a place so close to home while growing up. Nicola Turner, the creator of ‘Time’s Scythe’, echoes this feeling and describes the history of YSP as deeply inspiring and relevant to her installation. She is fascinated by how objects hold memory, and her art investigates our deep-rooted and often unconscious connections to our environment.

Louise Lockhart. Image Credit: Kathryntaylorphotographyuk189.

For her illustrations, Louise creates richly coloured artworks using hand-cut paper shapes and expressive line drawings. One might feel deeply nostalgic looking at Louise’s pieces as they turn familiar objects into joyful, folk-inspired designs that celebrate the charm of everyday life with warmth and a gentle sense of humour. The handmade feel of her cut shapes and line drawings transports the viewer straight back to carefree childhoods and reading illustrated books. Drawing inspiration from Mass Observation and ‘Barbara Jones’s Black Eyes and Lemonade’, Louise’s work reflects on shared experience and visual culture in Britain, celebrating a post-war curiosity about everyday objects.

‘Cake Crumbs and Lemonade’ is an exhibition drawn to markets, hand-painted signs, seaside rituals, and fairgrounds. She builds on individual details to assemble them into a print that often includes “things that look like they’ve been there forever, like a fortune teller on a seafront or a fish and chip shop unchanged since the 1980s.” Louise is concerned about homogenisation in art and talks about the “disappearing details of daily life.” She points to things such as “handwritten signs in markets and independent shops”, or fish and chip restaurants – places that used to be a “stalwart of the British high street”, she notes, but are now among the things disappearing most quickly.

Louise highlights that her work displays the importance of celebrating the good around us and seeing the bright side of things. She agrees with the words often used to describe her prints, such as “joyful” and “folk-inspired”. These words capture her style eloquently: her timeless illustrations are bright and inventive, often featuring vivid, risograph-influenced colours such as pink, turquoise, blue, and yellow, reflecting her fascination with mid-century palettes used on textiles, toys and packaging. 

Louise Lockhart Circus Horse Letterpress Poster0000. Image Credit: Louise Lockhart, courtesy of YSP.

Louise has always been inspired by the term “folk” as a loose way of describing the handmade, but clarifies she is keen on her work “being about the contemporary world”, and not just nostalgia. She strives for a “timelessness” in her work and hopes to convey things that we can all relate to, “no matter our age”. Using the example of the market-stall riso prints that Louise is particularly happy with, she reflects on her Yorkshire roots, highlighting things she has enjoyed since childhood, such as long red rhubarb boxes.

Nicola’s work also shares this sense of “timelessness”. Reinterpreting a prominent metaphor in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 12, which is universal in its notions, the title of the installation expresses the interconnectedness of our past, present and future.

Nicola mostly works with wool and horsehair, and her site-responsive installation at YSP breathes beguiling new life into the 18th-century Chapel. The striking sculpture, crafted from pale wool and horsehair, starts outside on the building’s façade, emerging from the bell tower and entering through an upper window, then flowing over the balcony and into the nave.

Nicola Turner’s ‘Time’s Scythe@ at YSP. Image Credit: Yorkshire Sculpture Park Instagram.

Upon visiting the exhibition, visitors will be able to move through its winding forms while the natural scent of wool deepens the immersive experience, and the sheep grazing in the landscape around the Chapel add further resonance. She animates the life force of these materials through their anthropomorphic nature, making a multitude of traditional sheep shears creep in through a hole and reach towards the altar like claws. The work comes alive as the shadow of the shears seem to peek out in the corner of your eye as you walk through the Chapel. 

Nicola sources hair from old upholstery filling and mattresses that have existed in close contact with generations of bodies as part of people’s everyday lives. She describes the organic materials she uses as “dead matter”, giving a certain sense of vitality to the shears’ movement. With “Sheffield” stamped on the sheep shears, we are reminded of the influence of local historic manufacturing traditions, including toolmaking and the production of woollen cloth in West Yorkshire.

Nicola Turner, Cloud of Unknowing, 2025. Image Credit: Nicola Turner. Courtesy Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

Both exhibitions feel very immersive and interactive. Louise’s work will be displayed in the Upper Space Gallery, lining corridors, walls, and the restaurant. She hopes that people can enjoy her work while eating a cake, and be inspired to “interact with the art that is everywhere and make it your own!” Nicola does not like to be prescriptive either: she prefers that people interpret her art the way they want.  

Slicing through spaces and mesmerising with their artistic autonomy, ‘Cake Crumbs and Lemonade’ and ‘Time’s Scythe’ are both exhibitions undoubtedly worth exploring at the YSP. While the former offers richly coloured, joyful art, and the latter focuses on resilience, inheritance, and transformation, both integrate British history and celebrate the rituals and materials of everyday life.

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‘Cake Crumbs and Lemonade’ is showing now in the Upper Space Gallery until 28 June. ‘Time’s Scythe’ will be opening at the end of the month on 28 March and running until 27 September. 

You can find out more information about visiting Yorkshire Sculpture Park on their website, and keep up to date with all their latest news on Instagram.