Rachel Goodyear: Modifications of the Host

Associated media

Bothy Gallery, Yorkshire Sculpture Park

1 October 2011 until 3 January 2012

This autumn, Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP) presents an exhibition of new and recent work by Rachel Goodyear. Tipped as one of Art Review’s Future Greats in 2008 and nominated for the Northern Art Prize in 2009, Goodyear’s compelling cast of characters inhabit a strange and complex world of contradictions, existing somewhere between the macabre and mundane. Exploring themes of fear, desire, vulnerability and isolation, Goodyear invites the viewer into a dark place where human psychologies and animal behaviour collide and merge.


Goodyear’s world is populated by transient beings, a realm of shape shifters and tricksters, spirits and apparitions. It is a site of unfathomable encounters between mythical things, where men turn into trees, birds emerge from women, and species flow and entwine until each becomes a metaphor for the other.