Snapshot - Clare Lilley

What do you do and why do you love it?

I head up the exhibitions, collection and engagement here at Yorkshire Sculpture Park. We have an amazing contemporary sculpture collection throughout the Park and a very busy programme of exhibitions and projects, which includes major international artists like Ai Weiwei and Bill Viola as well as those who are not so well known. We also programme performance, poetry, music and projects related to the natural world – a whole host of great things. I’m very much involved in advocacy, fundraising and communications, so it’s a varied position, but essentially my job is to make the Sculpture Park a place that people want to be and a place that contributes to the region and the nation in terms of art, education and the economy.

I’ve been here over twenty years, during which time we’ve grown from 15 to 500 acres of beautiful 18^th century landscape and a host of galleries. I love YSP. Once you get the soil in your blood, it’s really difficult to walk away from. The landscape itself is essential, I guess, in my life. And I love that the artists we work with are able to do incredible projects that stretch them.

What’s the first thing you do when you get to work?

As you drive in there’s a Henry Moore sculpture that overlooks the valley, so I slow down – sometimes I get out – and look across the valley, often seeing the sun rise, and just appreciate that it’s never the same. Even now, that sculpture and the view can take my breath away.

What can you see from your desk?

I’m looking out of my window now and I can see a silver birch and a slice of landscape right across the valley. The landscape is part of all of our buildings, but I have to admit that not everyone has as great a view as I do!

Do you get to leave the office?

A lot! Tomorrow, with three or four colleagues, I’ll be siting five sculptures between seven and ten metres high. They’re by the American artist KAWS and are still in Europe but we need to site now so we can figure out the logistics of installing them in February. So that’s an enjoyable hour outdoors!

I also travel a lot – to London very regularly for meetings, openings and dinners – and recently I’ve been working in Venice, Switzerland, New York… It’s never, ever, ever boring.

Do you get together much with the team?

This place is super busy so we don’t really get chance to eat lunch together or hang out much, though my team meets each week and every Monday the entire staff get together for thirty minutes to look at what we’re doing that week, what happened over the weekend, and to communicate what’s coming up. It’s a fairly large staff doing varied jobs, who work out of different buildings across this big site, so people can feel quite dislocated without that touch point.

I’m sort of wary of too many meetings and I have a high level of trust for our staff, who are talented and dedicated. I’m more of a walk and talk kind of person – I always liked how Aristotle walked everywhere with a scribe. Not that I would ever presume to be dispensing such wisdom! But it’s a great way to work things out and to generate creativity and energy.

What’s your biggest challenge in the job?

Pretty simple: keeping the money coming in. We’re a museum and a registered charity with an interesting business model in that we get less than 40% of our funding from the public purse, so we’re raising over £2m a year from other sources. Aside from the artistic programme, we have an awful lot of landscape, with woodland, lakes, historic features and as our responsibilities and ambitions increase, so our need for support increases too.

The Park has free admission and we’ll do everything in our power to keep it that way. The reason most of us work here is because we want contemporary art and the landscape to be accessible to everyone. We’re surrounded by diverse post-industrial communities, in what was the Yorkshire coalfield, and for us it’s important that whoever comes to visit feels welcome and that this is their special place.

Can you remember a time at work that made you smile?

I smile every day. Last week we had a Swiss artist here called Not Vital – that’s his real name; his father was called Not Vital and his father was called Not Vital – and a bunch of us were preparing for his really extensive exhibition and commission next year. It was the most fantastic day. We were out all day in the great weather, tramping the landscape, with different people coming in and out of the meeting as the day evolved. I went home and thought to myself, does it get any better than this? Everyone was bouncy. Everyone was enthusiastic.

What’s the last thing you do before you leave?

People who know me will laugh at this, but it’s honestly true: I try and tidy my desk so things are prioritised for when I come in. My office looks a bit of a mess, with pictures, books and magazines everywhere – but there really is order to the chaos! And then as I drive out I look at an internally lit sculpture by Jaume Plensa, sometimes with the sun going down or the moon above it. It’s based on a poem by Vicent Andrés Estellés and is the poet who looks over our souls during the long night. How lucky am I?

Clare Lilley is Director of Programme at Yorkshire Sculpture Park.
www.ysp.co.uk