COMMIT TO BE CREATIVE - Hand Tufted Rug Sculpture Inspiration

James Turrell 'Deer Shelter' rug design inspiration

Yorkshire Sculpture Park is one of my favourite places to visit and is only 15 minute drive away from where I live in Dewsbury and where I work in Mirfield. I very rarely go by myself as I love to show friends around and also have that ‘chat’ which you sometimes cannot do by text message or over the phone.

It was on one of these occasions that I was showing my best friend from Somerset around YSP who was visiting me on a beautiful summers day. I had walked around almost the whole of YSP showing Jackie all the sculptures. Dressed in shorts and flip flops, as it was summer after all, we made our way to the last place to see before we made our way back to the car park just in time before the car park there closed.

It is tricky walking in flip flops up hill but it was going to be worth it to see the James Turrell Deer Shelter. This is an amazing room built underground within an old deer shelter where the only light into the room is a square cut out of the roof without any glass so totally open to the elements. A beautiful calm place to just sit back on the deceptively comfortable moulded concrete seating which is heated during the colder parts of the year. Staring up at the hole in the roof to watch the clouds go by and just be calm and focussed on not very much for a while………….well that was the plan any way.

As we were making our way up to the hilly mound that covers the installation, we felt the start of a few of those annoying rain drops that typically catch you when you are in the middle of a 500 acre sculpture park dressed in flip flops, shorts and a tea shirt! Struggling to run in flip flops now on wet grass as the rain started lashing it down we managed to make it through deer shelter doors just as the rain became torrential. Amazingly, the room that I had become familiar with over the years took on a whole different feeling when the rain was pouring through the roof onto the formed concrete floor. It had never dawned on me before that the floor had a gulley around the outside edge just for this reason.

It was as I sat on the concrete seating watching and filming the rain that I noticed the marks left on the concrete floor by the rain leaving a perfect square in water fall effects…….