Artist Liz West's installation brings colour and light to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park's Chapel

The Yorkshire Sculpture Park’s 18th-century Chapel is such an unusual, interesting and beautiful gallery space. One of the many special things about it is how its own unique character relates to and combines with the artworks that go on display within its historic walls. The latest exhibition, an installation by renowned British artist Liz West, seems particularly well-suited to the Chapel’s natural light-filled, high-ceilinged space.
Liz West with Our Colour Reflection, 2024, installation view at Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Courtesy the artist. Photo ©Jonty Wilde, courtesy Yorkshire Sculpture ParkLiz West with Our Colour Reflection, 2024, installation view at Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Courtesy the artist. Photo ©Jonty Wilde, courtesy Yorkshire Sculpture Park
Liz West with Our Colour Reflection, 2024, installation view at Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Courtesy the artist. Photo ©Jonty Wilde, courtesy Yorkshire Sculpture Park

Our Colour Reflection, which opened last week and runs until early January, comprises hundreds of reflective discs in 15 vivid hues, and covers the whole of the ground floor of the building, providing some much-needed endorphin-boosting colour and light during the dark winter months. “I grew up in Barnsley, only a few miles away from the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, and I was taken there as a child all the time by my parents who are both artists,” says West who is now based near Manchester. “I have seen it change and grow over the last forty years and had always hoped to exhibit there at some point in my life. So, this is quite a pivotal moment for me.”

Using a variety of materials and exploring the use of light, West blurs the boundaries between sculpture, architecture, design and painting to create works that are both playful and immersive. Our Colour Reflection was originally created by West eight years ago when it was commissioned by 20-21 Visual Arts Centre in Scunthorpe and it has since gone on to tour to galleries and non-traditional artspaces both in the UK and abroad.

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Liz West, Our Colour Reflection, 2024, installation view at Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Courtesy the artist. Photo ©Jonty Wilde, courtesy Yorkshire Sculpture ParkLiz West, Our Colour Reflection, 2024, installation view at Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Courtesy the artist. Photo ©Jonty Wilde, courtesy Yorkshire Sculpture Park
Liz West, Our Colour Reflection, 2024, installation view at Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Courtesy the artist. Photo ©Jonty Wilde, courtesy Yorkshire Sculpture Park

“In 2016 I had had a run of making really successful immersive artworks, always architecture-led and I wanted to push my practice further by using natural light for the first time and as that thought process was developing, I was invited to make an exhibition in Scunthorpe,” explains West. “The curator at 20-21 Visual Arts Centre had seen other pieces of mine and he suggested I made a site visit there. The gallery is a deconsecrated church space and as it is a historic building I couldn’t fix anything to the floor or ceiling. While I was there, I started to visualize this piece. My colour palette at that point was incredibly vivid and I imagined a sculpture of glass, so it was reflective, and with a wider palette. I brought 15 colours all together so that it would look almost as though the sculpture had spilled out of one of the stained-glass windows. It was also about wanting people to look up and see the architecture by lighting up the space with colour. I drew a very quick sketch and that was the start.”

One of the requirements of the commission, which was Art Council funded, was that the installation could be packed away and could tour. “All my work before that hadn’t been this sustainable so I was actually pleased to be doing that,” says West. “People saw photographs of the work and they fell in love with it. It has been in all different types of spaces from botanical gardens to industrial warehouses. It is a work I am now very familiar with and it has been around the world including to India, Berlin, France and Finland.”

The work’s mirrored coloured discs are all set at different heights, carpeting the Chapel floor, capturing and emitting natural and artificial light, flooding the interior with bright colour and reflecting architectural details that visitors might otherwise overlook. The piece is constantly in flux, changing subtly throughout the day as it responds to the different weather conditions and light quality outside. There is a pathway that leads through the artwork inviting visitors to walk along it and become immersed in the colour. West’s aim with her works is to encourage a heightened sensory awareness in the viewer in order to promote a positive psychological and physical response.

“My work is a joyful celebration of colour and colour is an amazing universal language that everyone speaks and understands,” she says. “What’s really important to me as an artist is that my work is open to everyone. People have preconceptions about or associations with certain colours. I don’t want to tell people how to think or feel – it is about wellbeing. From my own point of view, it is a kind of self-portrait. I am vivacious and outgoing and colour is always something I have loved and have played with and I will continue to do so.”

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Liz West with Our Colour Reflection, 2024, installation view at Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Courtesy the artist. Photo ©Jonty Wilde, courtesy Yorkshire Sculpture ParkLiz West with Our Colour Reflection, 2024, installation view at Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Courtesy the artist. Photo ©Jonty Wilde, courtesy Yorkshire Sculpture Park
Liz West with Our Colour Reflection, 2024, installation view at Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Courtesy the artist. Photo ©Jonty Wilde, courtesy Yorkshire Sculpture Park

West’s interest in art and creativity began at a very early age and she had positive role models at home, with both her parents working as practicing professional artists and teachers. “They both had studios at home and I remember helping them to pack up work for exhibitions,” she says. “When I was little my mum used to set me up with a table in her studio where I could draw and paint and if I got bored, I would go to my dad’s studio. My dad, who passed away eight years ago, was a sculptor so his studio was always full of bits of clay and stuff to play with. So, I was either going to go completely in the opposite direction to my parents or follow them.”

As a child she learnt the elementary aspects of colour theory very young. “I think it was probably even before I could read, I was about three or four years old,” she says. “The materials I used to play with were reflective, very similar to the jewel-like colour I am interested in now. I was always fascinated by the relationship between colour and light. I remember making acetates and hanging them up on my bedroom window, I think I craved colour and light. I was making things that made me happy, that is what I am still doing, and I hope they make other people happy too.”

She had a revelatory moment while she was studying at Glasgow School of Art, thanks to an astute and observant tutor. “She took me to one side and ‘you are incredibly sensory, maybe that is what you should start looking at in your work – our sensory relationship to the world’,” she says. “That was a huge moment, she was an amazing tutor. It was just one sentence and it completely changed the way I worked.”

It led to the development of her distinctive visual language and internationally acclaimed creative practice. “There are a few things I always want to achieve with my work,” she says. “It has to be spatially aware and site specific – it has to feel like it belongs there – and it has to be immersive. It is almost like I am creating a sanctuary space for myself and for everyone else. To take away the clamour of the every day. We are saturated with information and noise, I try to pare everything down. It is a way of escaping that sensory overload. I never imagined my work being at the YSP so I am beyond delighted that Our Colour Reflection has been programmed in the Chapel. I love it as a space and it is such an honour for my work to be there.”

Liz West: Our Colour Reflection is at the Chapel at Yorkshire Sculpture Park until January 5, 2025. ysp.org.uk

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