The Art high

A reminder that art can change the temperature of a day

How is it that when you visit an exhibition - when it’s really good - it can make you feel like anything is possible again? Not in a “quit your job and start anew” kind of way (though maybe that too), but in that quiet, electric way where something inside feels reset. You walk in one person and walk out slightly changed. Lighter, clearer, more awake to the world.

Last weekend I had three days of that feeling in Yorkshire.

We began at Salts Mill (David Hockneys art home), where the American artist Ann Hamilton has transformed the top floor into We Will Sing - an installation that hums with sound, light, and woollen fabric. It’s a nod to the building’s industrial past, but also something much more human. Visitors are invited to write a letter to the future, and my daughter Maud (7) was game. When one of the volunteers - who also gently tugs the cords to make the bells chime - read hers aloud, I had a small, quiet tear.

You could also pick up printed pages scattered around the exhibition - fragments of text, drawings, and poetry - and build your own newspaper to take home. A genius keepsake. I must frame it, or summat (be left in a draw for years no doubt).

Salts Mill Ann Hamilton exhibition

The next day we saw the Turner Prize shortlist — consistently one of the most invigorating exhibitions you can see. Zadie Xa’s shimmering, sound-soaked underwater world and Nnena Kalu’s sculptural forms… layers upon layers of wrapped material.

And then, the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, my forever favourite trip on the way back from my mums. Among the Hepworths and Damien Hirsts was a new exhibition by William Kentridge, More Sweetly Play the Dance - the most imrpressive room showed a film where silhouettes of real people dance and march across a blasted landscape to jazz and African rhythms. Drawings come alive as banners; the whole thing moves like a dream and a protest at once. It’s on til April next year - defo take a trip up there (you could also go to the Hepworth gallery in Wakefield whilst you’re at it + Tom Stuart Smith garden).

Andy Goldsworthy, Damien Hirst, David Nash Steps, Gavin Turke egg.

If you make it up to Yorkshire then you should also try to go to the Andy Goldsworth Hanging stones - a circular walk with his art installations (you have to book ahead). I haven’t been but desperate to.

Art, when it’s this good, is the ultimate tonic.

S x