Ursula von Rydingsvard, 71, could easily be an intimidating interviewee. She’s hugely acclaimed in the US, where her enormous wooden sculptures can be seen in high-profile spots like the Met and the MOMA and outside The Barclays Center in Brooklyn. Then there’s the work itself: towering, rugged stumps which seem to rise up from the ground or imposing, Jenga-like structures which loom above you. And then there are the gigantic bowls and spoons and shovels, like artefacts from a lost society or stumbling on a prehistoric giant’s table. There’s definitely a sense of the robust, the immovable and the resolutely hard.

But even just speaking to her over the phone, you can tell Ursula is warm, enthusiastic and just excited to be in Yorkshire, where she’s putting up her first ever British show at the Yorkshire Sculpture park. 'It’s beau-teee-fulll!' she exclaims in a softly American-accented, gentle drawl. 'This is my third trip here and it’s so relaxing.'

'It’s so hard to imagine exactly how it’s going to look before you really see the breadth of it,' she explains of setting up the show. 'We decided where the pieces were going to go with templates. But that’s not often helpful because the height is so great so sometimes there’d be somebody who’d go round with us with a pole the height of the piece itself to see what would fit where.'

With such large pieces, some of which top 300-feet, it must have been a very long pole. Considering the scale of her work, you’d think Ursula would have to be incredibly methodical and plan each piece within an inch of its life. Not so. Bar a chalk outline drawn on the floor of her studio in Brooklyn, she carves each 4x4 plank by hand and and basically makes it up as she goes along. 

 

'That’s just how I work. I trust the instinctive part that’s not logical or rational or pragmatic or practical. However I do have to think about whether the piece is going outdoors or indoors, because I have to make it much more durable outdoors and they can have nothing that sticks out in an outrageous way or that feels too thin, too slender, too vulnerable to exist outside.'

And going with your gut is something Ursula feels strongly about in life as well as art. 'There are a lot of things in life one has to do that just enable you to exist, it isn’t necessarily something that’s really consequential to you in your life. [My art] is not an area where I talk to myself and say "I should do this", in fact I’m trying very very hard to get away from "shoulds" because they’re killers. Instead, I go into something that has a lifetime’s worth of experience that I begin to trust more and more because of the age that I am.'

And what a life she’s lived. Born in Nazi Germany, Ursula lived in eight different camps for displaced persons before moving to the US with her family when she was nine. Much has been made of her peripatetic upbringing and its influence on her use of wood. Theories have included the fact her farmer parents worked with the material or that she slept on planks in the camps. But Ursula isn’t keen on imposing meaning onto her love of cedar. 

'I don’t know what the why is, it just is,' she says, almost wearily. 'I’ve tried other materials like lead, felt blankets, pigs’ intestines and the stomach of a cow, hoping to get away from the cedar because I don’t want to feel like I’m stuck or I’m obliged to use it. But it seems for better or for worse, 98 per cent of what I have done has been done with cedar.'

And as to why she often makes things on such a huge scale, Ursula likes to live dangerously. 'There’s something about having a thousand or two thousand chances,' she explains. 'Because I build with one 4x4 at a time, every single 16th of an inch of what happens on the surface gets determined by me. To have so many chances to be able to make the energy and stir in the emotion, that somehow gives me a rise of excitement and anxiety while I’m building it. It could be a flop essentially – and if it’s starting to be a failure, trying to bring it out of the problem, and the problems are usually huge, sometimes records the best part of the piece.'

 

All of the outdoor sculptures for the YSP show are new, and surprisingly for an artist so associated with wood, her favourite is a 20-foot bronze bowl. 'The affectionate name that we used was The Bronze Princess,' she jokes. 'There’s something that feels almost anthropomorphic about it. I wanted to imbue it with a kind of purposeful energy but that went astray from time to time. I wanted the piece to be active, I wanted to put some anxiety into it, I wanted to put some celebratory feelings into it, but it’s not as if I set out to do that either. I just made my decisions and that instinct led me to making something that was packed with a range of emotions that shouldn’t be described.' And visitors are encouraged to touch her outdoor work, especially the bronze. 'The bronze piece is silky. And I like the thought that just as the Buddha belly gets rubbed a lot or the boobies of female statues get rubbed, it comes closer to the actual bronze.'

So other than getting hands-on, what else can we expect from a visit to this show? 'I hope people will try to erase their minds of what they think sculpture should do and just open their minds to a range of emotional possibilities.'

Ursula von Rydingsvard's pieces are at at Yorkshire Sculpture Park until January 2015.