Very proud to share that The Hepworth Wakefield has won Art Fund Museum of the Year 2017. Our education team won the Clore Learning Award at the Museum of the Year Awards 2013, so it's not the first time our endeavour, commitment and excellence has been recognised.
In 2010, I was living in Sheffield and looking for work. A friend mentioned a new gallery opening in Wakefield, I rang the education team and a surprised voice told me they had put a call out for creative practitioners that day! I applied and the rest is history.
Nat, Vic and Ami united an amazing team of movers, writers, musicians and visual artists - working in sculpture, installation, drawing, painting, photography and textiles. We were privileged in entering the gallery before any art was installed, with mud churned up around the building. We got to understand the space, it's light, angles, scale, building as object, nestled amongst and mirroring disused factory and mill buildings. Whispering about the past and the future.
The Hepworth Wakefield is deeply connected to this site, it's walls driven into the earth, The River Calder lapping against concrete, forming part of Wakefield's flood defence. Floor to ceiling windows frame the cityscape beyond, tapping you lightly on the shoulder to remind of the importance of landscape for Hepworth, her early formative experience in West Yorkshire preoccupying her life's work.
So, yep, PROUD!
