Breaking the Mould, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, review: how women carved a strange new artistic niche

Few of the works in Breaking the Mould would win prizes for beauty, at least in its traditional sense. The exhibition, which examines sculpture made by women since 1945, has a raspy lawlessness about it, especially in its range of materials. I hesitate to use the phrase “everything but the kitchen sink” because of its domestic connotations – and one of the objects is, in fact, a sink – but given the presence here of butter, fluff, salt, wicker, tights, flowers and even rawhide dog chew, it would be simpler to list the substances these artists haven’t used.

Playing fast and loose with the “stuff” of sculpture was, the curators persuasively suggest, a calculated move to nuke the idea that “sculpture” meant burly men bashing at chunks of marble. Even in 1966, 20 years after the earliest work on display, the critic Robert Hughes was marvelling at how Barbara Hepworth, with her “diminutive” and “delicate” form, could have “modelled and carved a body of work five times the size of Michelangelo’s in equally resistant materials and on as big a scale”. Hepworth battled long and hard against “this little woman attitude”. “Sculpture is not rape” was her response to Hughes. “No good form is hacked. Stone never surrenders to force.”

Some women embraced traditional, tough materials; metal is prevalent in Breaking the Mould, often serrated, barbed or whip-like. But others chose materials such as latex or cloth. These offered “a female language to which the male students didn’t have access”, according to the American artist Jann Haworth, represented here by her 1967 soft sculpture Calendula’s Cloak, a squishy, rainbow-hued figure who seems to have walked out of a medieval manuscript. And Cathy de Monchaux’s Ferment (1988) cleverly combines both approaches: blood-coloured velvet encased in knobbly, gun-toned lead.

Breaking the Mould is loosely divided into three categories: figurative, abstract and “found”/assemblage. The question it poses is something like: what is special about sculpture by women? There’s ample evidence here that while men were hogging the plinth, women were quietly pushing the medium in extraordinary directions – but I wonder whether siloing women’s sculpture in this way best demonstrates that. The narrative suffers in not clearly outlining which male sculptors were active in the same period, and what exactly the women were pushing against in terms of form/style.

Grumbles aside, there’s pleasure to be had in how many women thumbed their nose at Cyril Connolly’s dig that the “enemy of art” was “the pram in the hall”. Instead of limiting their work, motherhood expanded it. Phyllida Barlow took to working at night with no lights on when she had a baby, which led her to rely much more on touch. The American artist Mary Kelly, meanwhile, turned the minutiae of her son’s routine at playgroup into Post Partum Document VI (1978), a sequence of slate and resin tablets that resemble the Rosetta stone.

It is fascinating, too, to see how often women turned light, shadow, outline and absence into materials. You see it in the smooth, warm hollows of Hepworth’s Icon (1957), or in the fat, Turkish Delight-like cubes of Rachel Whiteread’s Untitled (Six Spaces) (1994), which describes the voids beneath various chairs. Intelligently placed next to the gallery’s glass wall, they glow beautifully in pools of reflected light.

Breaking the Mould is a zesty and defiant little show. The space practically bristles with wit and possibility. Go for the revelation if you like, but it’s equally rewarding as pure fun.

May 29 until Sept 5. Info: ysp.org.uk; 01924 832631