WAKEFIELD.- This spring, Yorkshire Sculpture Park welcomes artist Clare Charnley who is encouraging lambs to play in the Spring Lamb Project.

Working in YSP’s Country Park, over five days – 8, 16 and 30 May and 13 and 20 June 2015 – Charnley will create temporary play structures for lambs, altering and rebuilding them in response to the lambs’ reactions. YSP visitors are invited to watch the artist at work and to suggest different forms the sculptures, which will remain on display for the duration of the project, could take.

Lambs often climb onto their mothers’ backs or other high objects and can regularly be seen charging around in small groups, springing into the air, jostling each other or jumping off small mounds, one after the other. The world to them is understood in terms of social interaction and through pitting the body against material items – in short, through play. Charnley draws an analogy between this process and artistic production.

Although Charnley acknowledges the pleasure derived from watching young animals play, the project’s intention is not to anthropomorphise lambs; in fact Spring Lamb is a pun intended to remind visitors of their role as food.

YSP’s Country Park, the estate’s former 18th century deer park, now hosts works by world renowned artists including Henry Moore and James Turrell. The parkland has also previously offered artists the perfect location for interventions with sheep, including Andy Goldsworthy’s Shadow Stone Fold, 2007, in which the artist consulted with a tenant farmer at YSP to design a working sheep fold to replace the pre-existing wooden structure.

Visitors can join the artist for Clare Charnley: Meet the Artist (20.06.15 / 14.00 / Free / booking essential), an informal talk in the Country Park, to find out more about her practice and Spring Lamb Project.

Charnley is a visual and live artist based in Leeds. Born in Leeds, she studied Fine Art at Leeds Beckett University and Sculpture at Chelsea College of Art. She is Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Leeds Beckett University.

Recent projects have included Speech, 2002–07 which explored the problems of intercultural dialogue through a series of performances across the world, in which Charnley attempted to communicate speeches written by local collaborators, none of which she understood. Face-to-Face, 2013 involved members of the public being made over to look older than their current age, in order to generate discussions around age and to enable participants to gain insight into the subtly different ways older people can be treated.