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.
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.
