I DROVE The Ironing Fairy to Bretton last weekend so that we could enjoy Mother’s Day in the pleasantly pastoral surroundings of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

“There’s a Miró exhibition,” I informed her as we whizzed down the M1 – we were going south so that counts as downhill. We can have lunch and then see it.”

Half the population of the county must have had the same idea. We ended up in the overflow car park and then queued for our meal, trays in hand, for 20 minutes.

I’ve never seen so many mothers, daughters and grandchildren. But then I don’t suppose I should have been too surprised as the YPS is one of the region’s most-loved beauty spots.

It is also one of those places that always leaves me feeling confused as if someone has been telling a joke that I don’t quite understand. Maybe it wasn’t much of a joke, I reason, in which case I don’t have to feel stupid. But, on the other hand, perhaps it was so subtle that I am actually too stupid to understand.

I refer, of course, to the ‘sculpture’ part of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Because scattered around this fine, rolling parkland are hunks of metal, wood and stone laying claim to be works of art.

Now I’m as fond as any woman of ‘art’. I’ve even produced some of my own and was once an A-level art student. In my 20s I took an Open University course in Renaissance art and architecture and have been an avid collector of art books ever since.

Of course, this somewhat eclectic and patchy background in art doesn’t make me an expert by any means, but it does mean that I try to approach the subject with an open mind.

However, The Ironing Fairy (who, in case you hadn’t guessed, is my extraordinarily helpful mum) used to attend an Art Appreciation class with the University of the Third Age and doesn’t see the need to try. If she doesn’t appreciate something then she says so.

After viewing Miró’s body of work I asked her what she thought. She didn’t ponder for long: “Well, it’s all rubbish, isn’t it.”

Actually, she was nearer to the truth than she probably realised because Miró frequently took ‘found’ objects – including junk – fused them together and cast the resulting shapes in bronze. So you get a rickety old chair with odd shoes growing out of it, a tap fastened to the legs from a mannequin, a pitchfork fused to a stool – you get the drift.

And I wondered how many of the hoardes visiting at the weekend secretly shared her opinion – of the sculptures at least.

But it was impossible to tell because everyone was being delightfully polite and British.

The weirder the sculptures the more respectful they seemed to be. Children were excitedly pointing out objects that they could recognise while their parents and grandparents were probably wondering what it all meant.

Until I visited Bretton I had only seen Miró’s two-dimensional works and, I have to say, quite liked them for their strong lines, bold colours and interesting forms. The sculptures, in my opinion – and, as I’ve already said I am no expert – are, quite frankly, peculiar and difficult to fathom.

Miró began his artistic career at a time when modern art, as we think of it today, was in its infancy.

He was able to throw off the shackles of centuries of representational, structured art, rules of composition and paint styles and could do his own thing.

Like his fellow Catalan Picasso, I suspect he got a bit punch drunk with his own importance in the art world and, in his later years, began to test the limits of what the public would admire – and buy. Let’s not forget the buying.

Art appreciation is always subjective but whenever I see exhibitions of odd/unpleasing/disturbing/ugly sculptures that require an A 4 sheet of paper to explain what the artist meant I always wonder if someone, somewhere is having a laugh.

Shouldn’t the art be able to speak to us without lengthy explanation?

There is, it is often said, no such thing as good art or bad art, there is just art that we either admire, dislike or feel neutral about.

I often find that when viewing contemporary sculpture. I am torn between all three and don’t really know what to think, although I often veer towards the dislike.

As usual I left Bretton uncertain about what I had just seen.

Sometimes I wish I could be more like The Ironing Fairy who isn’t troubled by doubt.