Leading up to this year’s Tour de France, a large number of cultural events are being held under the umbrella Yorkshire Festival 2014. Fields of Vision is a company that’s taking part, creating an amazing series of huge, grass-related land art installations along a 65 mile trail. A total of 12 works will appear alongside The Grand Dpart route.
The designs will be transferred from paper to pasture through a variety of means including sowing, feeding, cutting, and white line marking. Because each of the installations will be so huge, there will be designated vantage points from which the public can stop in safety to enjoy the installations and reflect on the artists’ work.
Fields of Vision curator, Geoff Wood, said: “This project was developed to show off this beautiful landscape and to encourage others share it with us. What better way to view artists’ work than while walking, cycling or even driving these hills and valleys. We have shamelessly used the topography as a means of giving artists both a canvas and a gallery from which to view. Each artist has found a different way of reacting to the properties of the land, its population and the characteristics that brought Le Tour here.”
The first piece, in Stanbury, is an image of a shepherd beckoning to his sheepdog by artist Simon Manfield. Made on a field used to graze sheep, the artist had to instruct his team across the valley using walkie-talkies in order to create the massive outlines. The shepherd stands right above the road, making the automobiles underneath his feet appear like toy cars. If you’d like to see this for yourself, the best vantage point is outside the gates of Haworth Cemetery on Cemetery Road.
