'The Nature of Things'

There's a new exhibition in Salts Mill, just for the month of May. 'The Nature of Things' is work by members of the Yorkshire Sculptors Group. The explanatory blurb, too complicated to explain here, made it all sound quite interesting... and indeed it was. The artists are 'responding to this unrenovated part of Salts Mill' and to the materials they chose to use. Interesting... but none of it was, to me, particularly attractive or evoking of any real emotional response. If you're interested to delve further, the catalogue is available to read HERE. 

The pieces above are the work of Sarah Villeneau: 'Salvage' and 'Tenderness Chords'. 'Using the body as a starting point, these works use an assemblage approach to making as a way of exploring materiality and unexpected combinations. The use of found, discarded and repurposed materials with a make do and mend approach is somewhat transgressive and definitely playful.'

Below is Deborah Gardner's 'Invasive Species': 'influenced by the botanical gothic, plant horror and imaginings of future biospheres as a means of expressing anxieties as to our relationship with other species on earth, our climate crisis and a seeming lack of agency.'

Sally Barker's 'Dark Cloud' (above) was more immediately appealing to me, reminding me of a kind of Gothic chandelier: 'a shower of black, individually squeezed [ceramic] fingerprints, like a negative sunburst.'

I didn't know what to make of Christine Halsey's 'Domestic Landscape': 'stacks of clean white china and folded laundry sandwiched between ‘dirty’ or heavy building materials to create a precarious tower loaded with conflicting associations related to gender stereotypes' - but at least here I could discern some meaning. Similarly with her installation called 'Cold Dark Heavy Light', part of which is pictured below. This 're-imagines the West Yorkshire landscape as a vertical cross-section taken through its canals, rivers and moorlands, constructed from the earth, water, pollution and debris found there.' The hanging bottles contained liquid and some on the windowsill held earth. 

Finally 'two painted works are details taken from a map that was created in Saigon, Vietnam where I walked a relatively new neighbourhood of the city, known as District 7, collecting data. The squares containing the black and white cross hatching pattern represent building blocks, while the squares featuring colour represent road intersections.'  This is by Patrick S Ford, using a mobile phone app - and was quite pleasant but seemed a very complicated way to create what is essentially a few patterns. 

Maybe I'm a philistine! I did, however, enjoy the experience of looking round and trying to puzzle them out. It seems, particularly with sculpture these days, that it is more about the artist's relationship with the materials, their ideas and their emotional journey than the finished product per se. I think that's a bit different from painting or photography, but I know from my visits to the world class exhibitions at The Hepworth that some modern sculpture does have the power to move and excite me. 

Perhaps I'll revisit this, when it might be quieter, and see if my opinion shifts.