Unreliable weather and the threat of thieves making off with the artwork during the night have not stopped a growing trend to display sculpture outdoors.

It seems to have caught the public imagination and is helping venues to attract new audiences and bring existing visitors back for more.
Many of those involved are country houses that are placing contemporary art in historic settings. Some sites have permanent artworks, while others, such as the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, hold temporary exhibitions. 

Tatton Park in Cheshire is staging its second biennial (until 26 September) this summer, and Asthall Manor and Gardens in the Cotswolds recently held its On Form biennial (13 June-11 July), the UK’s largest stone sculpture exhibition. 
“The landscape is the main factor,” says Stephen Feeke, curator at Salisbury’s New Art Centre, which has just opened Let There Be Sculpture, a group show featuring emerging British sculptors (until 19 September). 

“The light changes, the weather and the trees change. Something that you line up in January is completely different by spring. It’s moment-by-moment and also seasonal. And in the open you are able to see it in the round, from a distance and close up.” 
Outdoor sculpture now receives a lot of attention, prompted in part by the fourth plinth project in Trafalgar Square. “Sculpture in the public realm used to mean a man you didn’t know, sitting on a horse,” Feeke says. 
“Now, perceptions of public sculpture have changed. It filters all the way down to housing estates, where developers are commissioning artworks almost on people’s doorsteps.”
Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP) was the UK’s first outdoor sculpture park. It opened near Wakefield in 1977 with more than 500 acres and the work of many high-profile artists.

The sculpture trail at Grizedale Forest Park, which covers over 10,000 acres in the Lake District, followed the same year. 
Grizedale and YSP are probably the most visited outdoor sculpture collections – YSP welcomes 300,000 visitors a year and 40,000 through its education department.

Even though neither site commissions that much new work, they have retained close links with sculptors whose careers they nurtured in the early days such as Andy Goldsworthy and David Nash, and this is a key to their success.
YSP now has a whole generation of people who have been visiting since its opening, points out Clare Lilley, its head curator. 
“Public engagement has been a key driver for our success,” Lilley says. Entry is free, and people clearly come for a day out to a beautiful landscape, regardless of the art. But it’s not a coincidence that people return again and again. 
“We took our educational ethos from Bretton Hall College, the teaching college that was on the site, which was all about direct contact with materials and processes,” Lilley says.

“As well as the permanent art, we have a lot of ephemeral projects where the art is responding to the environment but embracing the public.” 
Two hugely popular examples are Simon Whitehead’s illuminated night walks, where visitors had lights on their shoes and ran round the park in the dark (16 September– 12 November 2006), and environmental artist Brandon Ballengée, who set up a science lab in the park during the summer months of 2007 and 2008 to study mutated toads found in the grounds. 
“They were absolutely brilliant projects that enthralled people,” says Lilley. “There’s a rationale that has to be exercised in a museum space and the outdoors allows you to approach it with less academic rigour. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. 

“I’ve seen the blood drain from artists’ faces when they see the site – YSP is over 500 acres and has to be carefully negotiated. But when it works you are creating something that is greater than the sum of its parts. That sense of wonder is really important.”
“The appeal is a mix of the practical and the aesthetic,” says Patrick Elliott, senior curator at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh.

“It is in their space – a space they are familiar with, rather than a separate ‘sanctified’ museum space; people can see it regularly, pass it on way to work, and become familiar with it.” 
Charles Jencks’ Earthworks sculpture is particularly popular, and it won the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art the Gulbenkian Prize for Museum of the Year in 2004. “It is immediately appealing and fun, you don’t need to know about art to like it and you can sunbathe, picnic and relax on it,” says Elliott. 
Cleaning, maintenance, security and safety factors, however, can be costly. “People don’t always think of the ramifications of showing art out of doors,” adds Lilley. 
Special bases have to be made, children have to be prevented from climbing on some of the art, bronzes have to be waxed annually and security is tricky in an outdoor setting. A bronze sculpture worth £3m stolen from the Henry Moore Foundation in 2005 was reportedly melted down for scrap. 
Replacing jaded artworks can also be prohibitive. “We rarely commission works,” says Elliott. This is not purely because of the cost. 
“It is difficult because you never know exactly what the finished work will be like. We prefer to buy something we can see, or which we can gauge accurately beforehand. For instance, the Jencks’ mound is a variant of something previously done, and following his drawings, we knew exactly what it would look like.” 
However, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art is home to the first of Antony Gormley’s 6 Times figures.

The work, which was commissioned by National Galleries of Scotland and consists of six life-sized figures positioned between the gallery and the sea, went on display in June. The project was supported by a £150,000 Art Fund grant.
At Kew, some of the usual curating challenges are reversed, says Tina Houlton, head of marketing. “The plants are the priority, and although we have 300 acres there isn’t lots and lots of space for sculpture so there are siting issues.” 
Nevertheless, Kew has put on two outdoor sculpture exhibitions – the Henry Moore exhibition, Kew’s second, attracted record numbers in 2007-08 – and is in negotiations for a third. 
“We put on the sculpture exhibitions to attract a more thoughtful audience,” says Houlton. “It allows us to highlight Kew’s relevance and application as a botanic resource.”
There are practical issues, she says. “It’s not so much cost or security – we have a big wall around us – but we need to pick artworks that don’t need a lot of maintenance or revisiting.

“The Moore was a winter exhibition because the Henry Moore Foundation specifically wanted the work to be seen against a stark seasonal background.” 
The recession has inevitably had an impact, and YSP has had a radical overhaul of staffing structure, retail stock and other activities.

“We are already a lean organisation, but we own our commercial activities, and selling art has become an important part of our income stream,” says Lilley. 
The private collection at Jupiter Artland, which opened last year in the Lothian hills 12 miles west of Edinburgh, has suffered less from these constraints, with almost all the works commissioned for the setting by owners Robert and Nicky Wilson.

It has sculptures by Jencks, Goldsworthy, Anish Kapoor, Cornelia Parker and many others. 
Nicky Wilson trained as a sculptor and Robert is chairman of Nelson’s homeopathic remedies, and their aesthetic and business ethos merge at Jupiter.

“It means we can show new work by artists such as Charles Jencks and engage audiences in a very different way than in a national museum,” says art administrator Justine Watt. 
“Nicky and Roger commission all the work, so it is a very personal vision but they are extremely interested and involved in how work is placed and curated, and the sculptures are maintained to a high standard. We plan to take it year by year, and concentrate on developing long-term relationships with artists.”
Deborah Mulhearn is a freelance arts journalist