Joana Vasconcelos at Yorkshire Sculpture Park

Celebrated Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos creates vibrant, often monumental, sculpture, using fabric, needlework and crochet alongside everyday objects from saucepans to wheel hubs. She frequently uses items associated with domestic work and craft to comment from a feminist perspective on national and collective identity, cultural tradition and women’s roles in society.

Within the Underground Gallery, the exhibition contains works that celebrate the artist’s unbridled imagination. The monumental 12-metre-long Valkyrie Marina Rinaldi (2014), which hangs suspended from the ceiling, is one of a series of dramatic works that represent ‘valkyries’, female figures from Norse mythology who selected warriors on the battlefield worthy of a place in Valhalla. Made from multicoloured woolen crochet, fabric and flamboyant embellishments with tentacle limbs that reach across the gallery, Valkyrie Marina Rinaldi embodies the power of these figures through a dynamic mass of texture and colour that is intended to be both menacing and protective.

Vasconcelos also frequently draws on the popular cultural imagery of Portugal. Pop Galo [Pop Rooster] (2016) is a 9m rooster, covered by 17,000 Portuguese glazed tiles or azulejos arranged in a variety of patterns and illuminated by 15,000 LED lights. The artist has taken two icons of Portuguese national culture – the rooster of Barcelos and ceramic glazed tiles to make a contemporary pop art statement that injects new life and drama into these national symbols. Since 2016, Pop Galo has been exhibited outdoors in urban settings in Lisbon, Beijing, Bilbao and Barcelos. At YSP it will be seen for the first time against a backdrop of 18th century parkland.

Vasconcelos’ work has been recognised with major exhibitions at the Palace of Versailles, Paris (2012), where she was the first woman and youngest artist to present a solo exhibition; and Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao (2018), where she was the first Portuguese artist to present a solo exhibition. The exhibition at YSP coincides with Wedding Cake a major new commission by Vasconcelos for the rose garden of Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire from 13 June.