Yorkshire Sculptors Group
The Nature of Things
Many centuries before the philanthropist Titus Salt built Salts Mill and the village of Saltaire, the Roman philosopher Titus Lucretius wrote his epic poem De Rerun Natura, commonly translated as “On the Nature of Things”. This influential piece of writing was based on ideas inherent to Epicurean natural philosophy, and advocated moderation, simplicity and community as the foundation for happiness. The village of Saltaire, with its houses, almshouses, shops, schools, infirmary, washhouses, and churches, built by the deeply religious Salt for the workforce of his mill, embodied many of the ideas posited by Lucretius, despite the extravagant size and scale of the mill and his industrial dynasty.
De Rerun Natura was an attempt to show through poetry that everything in nature can be explained by natural laws, without the need for the intervention of divine beings. In its six chapters, the work examined the principles of atomism; the nature of the mind and soul; explanations of sensation and thought, and a variety of celestial and terrestrial phenomena.
As artists and sculptors, the nature of things is our primary concern. We invariably work with objects and materials, exploring what they do when subjected to various processes; we observe how things behave when we build with them, deconstruct them or juxtapose them with other stuff. We work sometimes scientifically and sometimes intuitively, concerned with how the results of our experiments stimulate sensation and thought in our audience.
This exhibition by The Yorkshire Sculptors Group takes place in an unrenovated part of Salts Mill where we are inevitably reminded of the nature of things: the paint peeling from surfaces demonstrating the pull of gravity and the effects of age and decay, the quality of natural light on deeply textural surfaces and the sensation of our own scale in relation to this vast open space.
As artists with widely differing interests and concerns we each respond to this space and exhibition title in our own individual ways, whilst recognising that it is the nature of things which connects all of our work and practices.
Exhibiting Artists
1. Garry Barker
The Cosmic Body, 2026: Ceramic, metal, textile. 221 x 250 x 30 cm
Garry Barker is an artist who tries to visualise the invisible worlds that lie beneath the stories he is told in everyday conversations. Working from tales of migration, stories about ill health, getting older or worries about the future, he tries to materialise reminders of where our unconscious takes us.
The body is a strange thing, looked at in one way it is a landscape and in another it is a bag of sea water that easily leaks. In Chinese medicine it is a "cosmic" entity, a small universe, that operates in harmony with the macrocosm of nature and in this realisation, it is a flying carpet, a fantasy where different realities intersect.
https://fineartdrawinglca.blogspot.com/
2. Sally Barker
Solar Thrive, 2026: Ceramic, tree trunk 130 x 40 x 40 cm. Dark Cloud, 2026: Ceramic, wire 70 x 70 x 70 cm.
In Solar Thrive the tree trunk is embedded with hundreds of small, glazed ceramics, shady- pale under the bark. Transformed across the tree in solar yellow each piece holds a fingerprint, made by repeatedly pinching clay. Dark Cloud is a shower of black individually squeezed fingerprints, like a negative sunburst.
Sally Barker has exhibited extensively in the UK and abroad, in gallery and non-gallery settings. She is a member of the Royal Society of Sculptors and lives in Hebden Bridge.
https://sallybarker.org Instagram: @sallyjbarker.
3. James Briggs
Fold, 2022: Painted Mild Steel. 30 x 100 x 200 cm
Architecture plays a recurring role in Briggs’ visual language. He is drawn to structural forms that shape the way we navigate the everyday, columns, beams, angles, and shadows. Architectural motifs that subtly guide our movement and awareness. By abstracting and recontextualizing these familiar forms, Briggs evokes a sense of memory, place, and temporality. His work does not aim to replicate architecture but rather to reimagine it, using form, material, and negative space to suggest what once existed, what remains, and what might return.
https://www.jamesbriggsstudio.com Instagram: @briggsjames_
4. Paula Chambers
Trap, 2026: Shamballa yarn, laundry props, wigs, mirrors, sticks. Dimensions vary
I crocheted a cargo net from 1,500 meters of the pale pink yarn more usually used to make shamballa bracelets. Pink wigs and plastic hand mirrors are hung inside the suspended net which takes on the form of a makeshift trap, perhaps to catch unsuspecting passersby, particularly those drawn to the accoutrements of femininity.
Paula Chambers is an artist researcher working across feminism, sculpture and the domestic, she has exhibited widely nationally and internationally. Paula is Associate Professor on BA (Hons) Fine Art at Leeds Arts University and is co-editor of the book Feral Objects: Speculative Approaches to Animism in the Arts.
https://www.paulachambers.co.uk Instagram@paulachambers
5. Liadin Cooke
Cloth Islands (blue+white), 2026: Ceramic, wax, bronze. 24 x 165 x 25 cm
Cloth Islands (blue+white) is an exploration of insular bounded spaces embodying the unknown. Hinting at invented narratives of place such as Hy-Brasil, the Fortunate islands or fata morgana mirages, mythical lands are typified by the mythologies embedded in folkloric representations of loss and wistful longing. While the work is ultimately an examination of contemporary nationhood, it is also an articulation of yearning for escape from an increasingly polarised world,
Liadin Cooke exhibits nationally and internationally. Her work is included in public and private collections and predominantly explores ideas around place, site and belonging.
https://www.liadincooke.com Instagram @liadincooke
6. Victoria FerrandScott
Dust to Dust, 2026: ongoing. Vine spurs, concrete, metal, rubber, found objects.
Dimensions vary.
Dust to Dust An ongoing series of sculptures which have at their heart the gnarly spurs of an old grapevine which the artist planted over 30 years ago in the rubble beside her home. Despite drastic pruning in an attempt to keep it in check, it continues to grow, its roots running deep. Each spur removed, bears the cuts of many seasons, now preserved within the dusty seal of new layers of concrete. A metaphor for life itself, loss, but also potential renewal.
Elected a member of the Royal Society of Sculptors in 2009, Ferrand Scott has been selected for exhibitions in London at the RSS, the Royal Academy and across the UK.
https://www.vferrandscott.co.uk Instagram @vferrandscott_sculptor
7. Patrick S.Ford
District 7, 3x3, Tile 1. District 7, 3x3, Tile 7. 2020: Plywood, MDF, acrylic paint, pencil. 30 x 30 x 3.5 cm each.
These 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. The colours were generated using a mobile phone app that recorded ambient colours. Hence the choice of colours was relinquished from the decision making and was managed instead by the app.
Patrick S. Ford has exhibited his work throughout Europe and Asia. His work is held in several public collections in Europe and Asia and in numerous private collections.
https://www.patricksford.com Blog: 33temple.blogspot.com
8. Deborah Gardner
Invasive Species, 2025: Repurposed electric cable, beads and cloth. Dimensions vary
Invasive Species is 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. The use of electric cable infers a bio hybridity, where plants and electronics or engineering form cohesive systems. The use of neon colours gives the work a strangeness, referring to both artifice and the natural.
Deborah Gardner exhibits nationally and internationally within diverse contexts, ranging from the gallery to the cemetery or the industrial site to the library.
https://deborahgardner.co.uk Instagram @_deborah.gardner
9. Carole Griffiths
Trou-de-Loup, ‘Buried in the Pit of Body. Unearthed by the Suppressed silencing of Inhabitation’ 2023-2026: Surgical body bandage, vintage lamp shade, string, plastic sphere. 80 X 58 X 58 cm
Trou-de-Loup was excavated through the creation of a hollow, formed by a taut body bandage and the interior of a lampshade. The cavity naturally becomes a protective and supportive space for a previously made work, enabling a sculptural reawakening. Drawing on autobiographical narrative, the work invites viewers to examine the peculiar and intricate relationships between things, subjects and words.
Carole Griffiths studied at Wimbledon School of Art, Coventry University and Bradford School of Art. Her widely exhibited UK work explores autobiographical domestic experiences through object–body displacement, emphasising relationships between objects, subjects, language, and reflective narratives.
https://carolegriffiths.co.uk Instagram @griffsculp
10. Joanne Hall
Fracture, 2026: Porcelain, copper, plywood, steel. 135 x 150 x 20 cm
Fracture is a by-product of another piece of work, Fragments, which was created for exhibition at Sunny Bank Mills in Leeds. Shards of the porcelain leftover from production of that work have been fired and presented here, drawing a parallel between both of these former mill spaces, echoing the fragments of time and memory that are embedded in the buildings.
Joanne Hall is an Irish artist based in West Yorkshire. Her practice is multidisciplinary, with materials playing an important role in her working process, alongside a particular emphasis on geological phenomena and movements in work, that focuses on uncertainty and the process of discovery.
https://www.joannehallart.co.uk Instagram @joannehall_art
11.Christine Halsey
Cold Dark Heavy Light, 2026: Plastic bottles, peat, river sediment, iron oxide, diesel oil, liquid paraffin. 140 x 30 x 200 cm. Domestic Landscape, 2026: crockery, folded laundry, bricks, concrete, fibreglass insulation. 80 x 80 x 200 cm.
Cold Dark, Heavy Light 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. Domestic landscape uses 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.
Christine Halsey’s work is concerned with how the relationship between things or materials alter our associations of them. Using processes of layering she blurs the distinctions between assumed polarities, playing with our preconceived notions of natural and artificial, animal, plant and mineral, or masculine and feminine characteristics.
https://www.chrishalsey63.wixsite.com/mysite Instagram @chrishalsey44
12.Terence Hammill
Vase, 2016-2024: Wood. 132 x 55 x 55 cm
Vase references the Burmantofts Faience High Vase designed by Leonard King and exhibited in the 1853 Gallery at Salts. I am intrigued by the way different cultures and styles are taken apart and recombined.
In my case Vase was inspired by a quote from Marcel Proust’s Le Temps Retrouvé ‘Une heure n’est pas une heure...’ (An hour is not merely an hour; it is a vase filled with perfumes, with sounds, with projects and with climates). In other words everything is contained within everything else; things become confounded, mixed up, confused as mythology and technologies collide, historical discrepancies are everywhere as time collapses.
13.Vincent James
Fallout, 2026: Fabric, toy stuffing, wire and wood. 85 x 135 x 180 cm
Fallout: Stay vigilant and stay ready to maximise the opportunities this peak construction presents. We are now locked and loaded to invest sheer guts and grit harnessing fusion. Under divine providence our dust is deeply buried in a golden age of nuclear. (Milliband 2025, Hegseth 2026)
Vincent James makes sculpture, collage and animation based on objects appropriated from cartoons. In his work props dislocated from these different worlds collide, creating surreal and whimsical interactions. He has work in Touchstones Rochdale’s Permanent Collection and the Frederick R Weisman Art Foundation Collection, California.
Instagram @vincentjamesartist axisweb.org/artist/vincentjames
14. Maja Novak
The Fool, 2026: Ceramic. 55 × 40 × 35 cm. All the Things We Are Becoming, 2026: Ceramic. 30×35×35cm
All the Things We Are Becoming drifts through ideas of nourishment beyond sustenance— towards what feeds the body, the land, and the spaces we inhabit. The Fool emerges as a shifting presence: part vessel, part body, part something unnamed. It swells and softens, exceeding its own form, as if becoming were a porous act. Suspended between human and other, it listens, absorbs, and transforms—an echo of the world that holds it.
Maja Novak is a Yorkshire-based Slovenian artist, working across ceramics, sculpture and installation. Her practice draws on material and sensory associations with food and vessels, engaging an intuitive, process-led approach.
https://www.majanovart.com Instagram @majanovart
15. Simon Raines
My Grandfather’s hands (The Concrete Factory), 2025: Plywood, birch and redwood. 115 x 38 x 200 cm
Simon Raines creates work that is driven by the joy of making and experimenting with materials. Working mainly in wood, although not exclusively, these simple graphic compositions have elements of repeated geometry and contain a sense of craft and workmanship. My Grandfather’s Hands is a series of works that asks questions about identity, and the notion of inherited skills and the expectations of craft and making within the field of contemporary art.
Simon Raines is a sculptor based in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire. An elected member of the Royal Society of Sculptors, he was selected for the Yorkshire Sculpture International Network in 2025, and was longlisted for the 2026 Aesthetica Art Prize.
https://www.simonraines.net Instagram @ s.a.raines
16.Connor Shields
Sandbag I, 2023-4. Plaster, rubber. 30 x 60 x 27 cm. Sandbag II, 2023-4. Plaster Rubber. 30 x 30 x 27 cm. Sandbag IV, 2023-4. Concrete. 30 x 60 x 27cm
I regularly see discarded sandbags that linger on the streets after construction has finished. They become part of the everyday landscape and punctuate the city, but often go unnoticed. By casting these objects— some more realistically painted in rubber, others less so cast in concrete, they sit somewhere between the familiar and the ambiguous.
Connor Shields’ practice developed in response to experiences of a post-industrial upbringing. Interested in the visual language embedded within materials, objects and industrial landscapes, his work, an investigation of materiality and craft techniques, creates a visually powerful dynamic through which ideas of ‘working-class masculinity’ are explored.
17. Linda Thompson
Nest Egg, 2026: Resin, fibreglass, polystyrene, wool, scrap metal, paint. 105 x 23 x 30 cm. Tooth Fairy 2026: Ceramic, string, resin, fibreglass, polystyrene, teeth. 138 x 41 x 41 cm. Raindrops 2024: Ceramic, wool, animal bones, paint. 23 x 16 x 7 cm. Watchtower, 2025: Ceramic, string, metal. 42 x 9 x 7 cm. Sea Shore, 2025: Ceramic, metal. 33 x 18 x 8 cm.
The work exhibited here is derived from the form, mass and balance of rocky landscape structures fused with personal memories, the sense of organic life cycles, and the spiritual and physical sense of a specific place at a particular time.
Linda studied at Ripon and York St John College, Bretton Hall and Leeds University. She has exhibited widely in group and solo exhibitions. Her work is held in a number of private collections worldwide and is part of the English Heritage permanent collection.
www.lindathompsonsculpture.com
18. Jill Townsley
Homogeneous Catalysis, 2023-2024: Plastic straws, tile spacers, shrink wrap. Dimensions vary
During a collaboration across disciplines with pharmacologist Dr Farideh Javid, who researches new cancer treatments, I discovered that two different materials can interact at their interface, forming transient states that trigger structural or chemical transformation. In response through sculpture, I connected plastic straws with tile spacers, creating an open networked structure. Once covered in plastic film, the interplay between the internal geometry and the external constraint or skin generated a new closed yet mutually dependent structure.
Jill Townsley studied sculpture at the RCA and has a PhD in art practice, her work often explores human, scientific, technological and ecological processes.
https://www.jilltownsley.com Instagram @ jilltownsleyart
19. Sarah Villeneau
Salvage, 2024: Coiled and extruded stoneware, solder, found driftwood, found marine rope. 45 x 62 x 38 cm. Tenderness Chords, 2023: Coiled and extruded stoneware with embedded slate fragments, removable extensions, hazel sticks wrapped in string with bells, guitar wire, screws, grass skirt fronds. 75 x 90 x 60 cm. Hair Out of Place, 2024: Slab built stoneware, with solder, antique carjack, found oak slab, synthetic hair. 45 x 40 x 40 cm
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.
Sarah Villeneau works with ceramics and found materials. A member of the Craft Potters Association, Royal Society of Sculptors and Homo Faber Guide, she has exhibited across the UK and in Japan. Her work is in private collections in the UK, USA, Europe and Japan.
https://sarahvilleneau.weebly.com Instagram @sarah_villeneau_ceramics
20. Melanie Wilks
Three Totems, 2026: Aerated concrete, metal. 145 x 100 x 100 cm.
Melanie Wilks is inspired by themes, often biographical in nature that explore the human condition and her sculpture reflects what is happening in life at the time of making or in the past. Three Totems represents the post traumatic healing and repair of the mind, body and spirit. A symbolic connection between them.
Wilks is a member of MAFA Manchester Academy of Fine Arts, she exhibits widely across the UK and her publicly commissioned sculpture can be seen in town centres, parks and public spaces around West Yorkshire, North Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire.
www.melaniewilks.com Instagram @wilksmelanie facebook: melaniewilkssculptor
21. Louise K Wilson
Minerals 4, 2026: Mineral samples, foil, drawings on paper. Dimensions vary
Minerals 4 is an ongoing series of speculative geological proposals, exploring imagined trajectories out-in- and-through various mineral samples (drawn from a family collection). In this instance, the gestural extensions for these (crystalline) geometries respond to the particular resonant architecture of the Mill.
Louise K Wilson is a visual artist who has exhibited nationally and internationally and who often travels to various military, scientific and historic sites (including nuclear submarines, US listening stations, university halls, marine research environments) to make work.
https://www.lkwilson.org Instagram @wilsonlouisek
22. Steven Wood
Oxidised Memories, 2022: Wood, paints, steel, 3D prints. 152 x 162 x 135 cm.
Oxidised Memories is two sculptural beings riding on wooden chariots, their long rusting bodies reaching forward as if drawn through time. Each carries a silky blue 3D-printed head - an engineered future resting on a corroded past, timber and digital fabrication peel back layers of memory while suggesting new beginnings. In their quietude these forms become vessels of transition, moving through temporal strata as they advance, shed and transform.
Often combining technology with traditional sculptural methods and materials, Steven Wood’s work touches on themes of surrealism, memory, trauma, and the human condition.
https://stevenwcreations.com/ Instagram @stevenwcreations