MACABRE and gruesome characters have taken over at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park this month.

In the run-up to Halloween the work on show at the park, which attracts thousands of visitors a year, is from hotly-tipped artist Rachel Goodyear.

Drawings by Rachel – who was tipped as one of the Art Review’s Future Greats – will be hung in the West Bretton park’s Bothy Gallery.

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.

Rachel was born in Oldham and completed her BA (hons) in Fine Art at Leeds Metropolitan University in 2000. Since then she has lived and worked in Manchester.

Programme director Clare Lilley said: “Rachel’s extraordinary drawings have rapidly attracted award nominations, public and private collectors and critical acclaim.

“The compelling cast of characters she has created inhabit a strange and complex world of contradictions, existing somewhere between the macabre and mundane.”

The exhibition includes a new series of work inspired by time spent walking and discovering the physical and imagined landscape at the sculpture park, resulting, for the first time, in small-scale sculptures by Rachel.

Ms Lilley said: “As if scrambling from the pages of Rachel’s sketchbook, figures appear in the gallery as animations and porcelain sculptures, still fragile and unsure of their new configuration.

“The viewer struggles to recognise the human or animal depicted in sculptures – such as the hazards of falling asleep in the woods – but is nonetheless intrigued by what could have happened to these creatures whose bodies have become engulfed by a strange material.”

One of Rachel’s pieces depicts a faceless bride led to the altar by a pack of Labradors.

In others, she draws on myth – depicting the ‘trickster’ who appears at doorways or in poorly-constructed disguises.

Ms Lilley said: “Rachel’s new animations show devils locked in an endless spiral, their dance more than tinged with menace.

“Sinister sound within them draws the viewer through the gallery and into the artist’s world, where fascination and bewilderment at the conduct of these characters takes over.”

Rachel’s current work is informed by her recent residency at the Banff Centre, which is set within the remote mountains of Banff National Park, Canada.

The exhibition runs until January 3.