Sensory Spaces 13 - Anne Hardy

Take, for example, the installation 'Falling and Walking (phhhhhhhhhhh phossshhhhh crrhhhhzzz mn huaooogh)', which Hardy made for London Art Night 2017. Visitors stepped through a hole in a billboard to arrive in a bright green room, followed by a bright pink room with rotating electric fans, curtains of video tape, flattened beer cans, concrete blocks, balls, twigs and a sloping wall with a circular opening affording a glimpse of the next space.

Hardy refers to her works as ‘sentient places’. They are partly architectural, partly organic and their carefully created audio scores and lighting fluctuate and change over time. ‘The tactile engagement with material, light and process is at the core of my practice, and I want the work to have an active presence that changes around you.'

‘The tactile engagement with material, light and process is at the core of my practice, and I want the work to have a sense that it is an active presence that changes around you.'

Anne Hardy.

Hardy finds many of the materials, objects and sounds for her FIELD works on the street: things that have been discarded and have lost their original function. Hardy believes they are therefore in some way free of language and order and suitable for new uses and meanings. They have become essentially ‘ambiguous’ in the sense that they have the possibility of containing two or more ideas simultaneously. Hardy thinks in the same way about space and has an inventory of places that also have this feeling: street corners, or a piece of land between two roads, or an empty corridor. They are places that are both strange and familiar, floating between the real and the imaginary. It is precisely this ambiguity that Hardy captures in her ‘Fields’. They have something magical – something you have to experience but which is also hard to put into words. In Hardy’s own words, they make us aware of ‘the slippery nature of our perception of the world’.

Hannah Duguid wrote about Anne Hardy's work in The Independent: "Hardy achieves a degree of magic with her installation, which is very difficult to do. Plenty of solipsistic installation artists out there tediously fling objects together with results that never quite work. Hardy’s installations possess a complexity and pleasure that put her in a class of her own."

Essay Sensory Spaces 13 - Anne Hardy

Each exhibition will be accompanied by a bilingual booklet with an essay by the curator: