Hole-in-roof sculpture makes art of Yorkshire sky

WAKEFIELD, England, May 31: Making a hole in the roof to let in Yorkshire's gusts and downpours may seem unlikely to inspire quiet contemplation among art lovers more accustomed to busy indoor galleries.

However, that is what Californian artist James Turrell, dubbed the ''sculptor in light'', has done with his latest installation, which opened this month among green, sheep-flecked hills at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in northern England.

It is housed in an unassuming building sunk into the hillside, which used to shelter deer behind its red brick arches. Now the arches lead to an austere concrete chamber, designed to hold about 20 people. Tilted faces stare up at a square of sky framed by the white roof.

Visitors shuffle in awkwardly, then become absorbed.

''It's like watching the sky on a big television,'' said one, shedding his initial inhibitions. ''If you stay here long enough, you get quite calm.'' They are inside a ''skyspace'', as Turrell calls the simple rooms he builds with an opening to the sky.

Brought up as a Quaker with a tradition of silent worship, his idea is to remove distractions and let visitors absorb changing light and colours, with sunsets and sunrises creating an illusion of the sky coming within touching distance.

He has created about 40 skyspaces in as many years, and continues work on a vast light observatory in the Arizona desert.

A pilot who flew monks out of Chinese-occupied Tibet after the 1959 rebellion, Turrell draws his ideas from a pilot's perspective where light, clouds and reflections make up the landscape.

He sees light as a physical substance, saying: ''Light is not so much something that reveals, as it is itself the revelation.'' On a recent blowy morning, the Yorkshire skyspace framed a moving picture of twists of cloud drifting across a blue background, only to be swiftly replaced by a steely-grey mass threatening rain. As a concession to the climate, the room is lined with benches heated from beneath in cold weather.

Turrell says Yorkshire's ''beautiful maritime skies'' are precisely what drew him to the area. He initially had the idea for the shelter in 1993, but had to wait for an 800,000-pound grant from the Art Fund to build it. ''The softness of light you find here is extraordinary,'' he says in comments posted on the walls of the centre. ''There's a moisture in the air, so you have a really soft light, and it's often very variegated as well, with lighting events that come from openings in clouds and so on.'' ARCADIAN LANDSCAPE Fitting sculptures to the Arcadian landscape that surrounds them is the core of the sculpture park's work. In the 18th century, the estate's owners constructed a parkland dotted with glasshouses and follies, and now artworks scatter the slopes in a modern twist on those origins.

Below the deer shelter, lambs huddle inside a Henry Moore bronze.

A polished patch shows where people sit to watch the hillside framed in the metal curves.

Enjoying the view with them is a bronze female figure, placed to look out from her bench at the hillside and the broad valley stretching towards the ex-mining town of Barnsley.

''It couldn't be anywhere else but Yorkshire,'' says Jan Wells, spokeswoman for the park. ''The landscape creates distinct separate galleries,'' she adds, highlighting the contrasts between the deer park, woodland and formal Italianate gardens.

The park has recently expanded, with an underground gallery hidden behind a yew hedge and turfed roof.

Its three rooms now house a darker, more unsettling series of Turrell's light installations -- one plunged in such deep gloom that bewildered visitors have been known to sit on top of one another as they grope for the benches, Wells says.

Yet the deer shelter, disturbed only by the sound of wind and contented sheep, could prove a haven for drivers escaping the nearby motorway.

''Peace in a mad world -- fantastic,'' one man has written in the centre's comment book.

Turrell frequently refers to his Quaker upbringing, when his grandmother told him to ''go inside and greet the light''. He has built one skyspace for a Quaker meeting house in Houston, Texas, and others provide space for reflective thought.

''Splendid -- I like the window too,'' writes Gavin, while a plaintive scribble reminds us that bringing the sky within reach is not just an illusion. ''It was raining! Drip drip ...''

Reuters