The Yorkshire Sculpture International ought to be better than it is. A collaboration between Leeds City Art Gallery and the Henry Moore Institute next door, the Hepworth Wakefield and the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, it is an up-and-down affair. There is no real sense of collaboration or unified curatorial overview, over and above the idea that “sculpture is the most anthropological of the art forms”, an axiom provided by sculptor Phyllida Barlow. Discuss. Korean Kimsooja has installed a mirrored floor in Yorkshire Sculpture Park’s chapel and put film on the windows to refract the light, casting rainbows round the chapel. It doesn’t do it for me. Maria Loboda has dead, exotic insects poking out from behind the specially installed alabaster light fittings in one space at the Henry Moore Institute. Huma Bhabha has installed a specially commissioned, cyborg-like figure between a statue of Queen Victoria and the war memorial in Wakefield. Carved from styrofoam then cast in bronze and painted, it grins at nothing and no one, like a recent arrival from another planet. At least it is an escape from the Damien Hirst sculptures in Leeds town centre, and towering over the sheep in Yorkshire Sculpture Park. I guess they are here to add a bit of oomph. I have nothing to say about them. A Hirst ram with golden horns occupies a room of Victorian paintings at Leeds Art Gallery, where Rachel Harrison shows an abstracted grey head that appears constructed from cardboard packaging and burlap. Trapped under one corner is the wrapper of some equally cobbled-together industrial snack bar. The visible bit of the wrapper tells us this undoubtedly flavoursome treat contains cured bacon, berries and sunflower seeds, with no added antibiotics or hormones. I guess the sculpted head grew up on a similar diet. Joanna Piotrowska has carpeted a nearby gallery and dotted it about with works from the museum’s collection. Around the walls she shows black and white photos shot in people’s homes in different countries. She asked the inhabitants to create shelters using rugs and piles of books, tables, boxes, houseplants and whatever else they had around, and then photographed the tenants in situ, cowering under the kitchen table, crawling out from their make-do tents and half-hidden behind their indoor barracades. These are fun, but the overall installation doesn’t mean very much. Upstairs in the recently restored Great Court, with its wonderful Victorian skylight, Ay?e Erkmen has built a skeletal full-size model of the barrel-vaulted roof in the gallery below, whose floor was a later addition to what was a full-height atrium space. Standing on the floor, you look up though Ergman’s welded, polished aluminium structure to the real roof above. The experience is strangely dislocating. I wonder for a moment if I am one of those figurines architects use to populate their model buildings. Give me instead the slightly Ghostbusters blob-thing that has sidled up to a pillar in Nobuko Tsuchiya’s group of works here. Her disarming, somehow friendly sculptures and arrangements have also mostly been made with what’s to hand. Playfulness is not to be underestimated as an art-making tactic, especially when it engages the viewer’s own imagination. You want to go home and do it yourself. Or hide under the table and never come out. A Hirst ram with golden horns occupies a room of Victorian paintings at Leeds Art Gallery, where Rachel Harrison shows an abstracted grey head that appears constructed from cardboard packaging and burlap. Trapped under one corner is the wrapper of some equally cobbled-together industrial snack bar At the Henry Moore Institute, Rashid Johnson has covered three big trestle tables with mounds of shea butter. Piled up like whole cheeses, sculpted into rough head-and-shoulders lumps, or left in broken and smeared pieces you are invited to play with, rub into your skin, smell or lick, Johnson’s Shea Butter Three Ways treats the waxy substance, derived from a nut grown across the African savannah, as something more than a sculptable material. You can use anything to make sculpture, but everything comes with associations. Shea butter is used as an emollient, as cooking oil, in cosmetics and traditional medicine. It is laden with cultural associations. This work is the closest we get to an anthropological nexus in the entire series of exhibitions. Upstairs in the library, Sean Lynch has resuscitated Flint Jack, a notorious 19th-century forger of flint arrow- and axe heads and other supposedly stone-age finds he discovered on his wanderings across England and Scotland, many of which he sold to collectors, antiquarians and museums. He made them all himself. An expert, self-taught artisan, he lived and worked by his wits and guile, and even conjured an old tea tray into a Roman shield. Flint Jack was the genuine article: a real fake, preying on the collector’s avarice. People half-knew they were being had, willing themselves into belief. A metaphor for the artist, then. Wolfgang Laib’s installation uses handfuls of rice to cover a large gallery floor at the Hepworth Wakefield , setting a few small stone sculptures, covered in ash, amongst little piles. I find this inordinately precious and dull, and refuse to believe, though there are many sincere suckers for this sort of thing. There is quite a bit of self-conscious noodling-about and ho-hum sculptures wherever you go. The best work at Wakefield, by miles, is by Iranian-born Nairy Baghramian. Using rough cast sheets of aluminium, and smooth resinous forms made from a hard pigmented wax used to polish metal, she choreographs the space. The stepped and rounded rhomboids, wedges and blocks have a great solidity and weight, yet seem capable of gliding about. An edge lifts from the floor. A tilted plane slumps, another form accommodates itself to an aluminium slab. Sometimes two forms are pressed together by oversize clamps. These cleavings and conjunctions feel like a slow, controlled ballet, with its holdings and releasings, leanings and supportings, convergences and separations. These movements all have a choreography of care about them, as well as drama, even as the brittle shine and sharp, friable edges of the unfinished metal sheet buffs against the softer thickness of the waxy forms. I love all this. Bahramian really knows how to use space and light as well as form. There is a sense of flow arrested, time suspended. Even her photographs of smoking chimney stacks, the vapours steaming and trailing across empty skies, adds something to the overall installation. The more you look and walk around, the more you notice details, yet somehow it is all very quiet and understated. The Yorkshire Sculpture Park has mounted a survey of American sculptor David Smith, taking us through his career from the 1930s to his untimely accidental death in 1965. Principally a welder, Smith’s development is followed through a series of galleries and out into the open air. This is an instructive, self-contained exhibition, which follows Smith from his prewar development, influenced principally by Picasso, Julio González and Giacometti’s surrealist period, and his work in car plants and wartime tank factories in the US, to his increasingly abstract postwar work. Later, Smith became a bit too frontal for me. He veered between a kind of totemic figuration and abstraction. In his later work there is all too often a front view to be looked at, rather than a sculpture to be walked around. The work’s installation reinforces this view. His best work was a kind of steel and iron bricolage, here you feel him working things in the round. The rest is just all heft. A trip to the four galleries and two cities over the next 100 days is unlikely to prove or disprove anything much at all, other than that there doesn’t seem to be any shared idea here about what sculpture now might be, never mind about the anthropology. The Yorkshire Sculpture International is going to have to up its game to make further editions worthwhile.