Anne Hardy’s captivating interlopers

In an upstairs room of a building in Shoreditch there is a hooded figure kneeling in front of a window. It has a tail, made from flattened tin cans, that runs from the bottom of its neck into a curved wooden stick resting on a pile of dirt. This is what you see first when you enter the space – the figure’s back, the soles of their mismatched high heels – and then, as you walk towards the window, their hands, palms up in a gesture that could be one of worship or despair. In front of them there is a precise arrangement of silver and gold objects: beans, a seed pod, something resembling either a mouldy apple or a heart. A paltry display of worldly goods? Ingredients? An offering? From this angle, it becomes clear that the figure is also not really a figure at all, but a faceless, bodiless, half-formed thing.

This is Being (Interloper), one of two figurative sculptures included in Anne Hardy’s solo exhibition ‘Survival Spell’, currently on show across both of Maureen Paley’s London galleries. Hardy admits that at some level both of the works are “self-portraits”: they wear her clothes and the armatures are welded to her body size, but they’re also “metaphors for states of being.” With Being (Interloper), she was thinking about “a character who moves through spaces where maybe they shouldn’t be moving, they’ve been placed in the position of being an interloper or have they chosen to become an interloper, how at times it might be useful to adopt the position of an interloper so that you can move freely and be who you want to be.”

We’re sitting opposite each other on fold-out metal chairs in the storage room of the gallery on Three Colts Lane. It’s an odd, slightly awkward set-up for an interview, but perhaps also an appropriate place to speak with an artist who spends much of her time rummaging around in the overlooked or forgotten corners of the city, collecting discarded objects to use in her work. Sometimes, she picks up random objects, “it just happens to be in my path when I’m walking,” and at other times, “it will be things that I don’t really know what they are.” She points to one of two “secret” works – presumably meant only for the eyes of special collectors – that are mounted on the wall next to us. “Like that stick. I have no clue what that is. Maybe a handle from something but the notches are very particular.”

The works in this latest show were begun during her month-long residency at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas where she challenged herself to work with as few materials as possible, partly in response to her sparse desert surroundings and partly as a pushback against an intense year of large-scale production. “It felt very grounding in a way that I’d never really experienced before, in a deeply animal or organic way,” she says.

Since returning home, she has tried to maintain a close connection to the natural cycle of the day by rising with the sun and walking to her studio across as much grass as possible. It also inspired a mass studio clearout to create more space, but also to allow things to sit and move around over time. This approach has manifested in the new works as precision, but as Hardy explains, it also made room for allowing accidents into the work. For instance, one of the fingers on the hands she cast for Being (Immaterial) – the other figurative sculpture – broke when she took it out of the mould too quickly. She used the broken cast as a placeholder and after a couple of weeks decided not to remake the hand after all.

The works also bear the material remnants of her time in the desert – from rocks to a light bulb programmed to respond to meteorological data from Marfa – mixed with things she found around London and a few bits (like the mysterious notched stick) from Tokyo where she had an exhibition last year. Brought together, they create a tangled, shifting experience of place, but for Hardy it’s less about evoking specific geographies than finding a kind of shared energy between objects. They all come from what she calls, “pockets of wild space,” which aren’t “bound by quite the same structures as most of the space in terms of expectations or rules.”

Hardy made her name in the 2000s for images of dream-like environments that were constructed in the studio from found objects, photographed and then destroyed. The large-scale installations or ‘field works’ for which she’s now best known, combine sculpture, found objects, sound and colour to a similarly precarious effect, transporting the audience into theatrical sets that often bear marks of devastation and the eerie remnants of human life. Falling and Walking (phhhhhhhhhhh phossshhhhh crrhhhhzzz mn huaooogh), her commission for ArtNight 2017, combined lighting that responded to abstracted field recordings from the edgelands of east London with trailing curtains of VHS tape, collapsing structures and scattered debris to create a portrait of a city in flux while in 2019, for Tate’s winter commission, she transformed Tate Britain’s neoclassical facade into a marooned temple. Slabs of ice on the steps and sculptural patches of mud dredged up from the Thames evoked the aftermath of extreme weather events while ripped banners, flashing lights and recordings of sounds from under and around the river and the city gave the impression a building possessed.

These large-scale works, she says, are like “illusions that you enter into, where your body is affected by what happens around you,” while the new figurative sculptures are “more like things which live in that landscape.” As with all of Hardy’s work, their form emerged from the materials she had around her. “I had a pair of jeans in my studio and one day I just made this very simple armature for the legs and I propped it in the jeans.” Both sculptures appear caught in a process of becoming. Being (Interloper) is a hollowed-out half-human, half-reptile while the swirl of rusted wire in place of the torso and head of Being (Immaterial) invokes the impression of something coming into, or being sucked out of, existence. “It felt important that [these figures] are present, but also not there – they’re present in an energetic form more than in a corporeal form,’ she says.

This relates to the exhibition’s wider concept, which has to do with the conjuring of something, with transformation from one state into another. There is a playful nod to witchcraft, particularly in works such as Lure (wand), a curved branch cast in pewter, and Portal (Fallen Branches) which comprises branches balancing on what looks like a steel cauldron, but also to nature and the everyday. The curve of dirt and arrangement of objects – some of which appear like bunsen burners – in the title piece, Survival Spell, for example, could evoke an occultish ritual or a campfire while Solar Tank manages to make something ethereal out of what could be a car windscreen, some wire and a lightbulb. The duality is what makes Hardy’s work so clever and captivating, but also strangely accessible: the potential for transformation is there, it’s up to you whether you see it. “I’m interested in that balance, at which point your imagination allows you to complete something,” she says. “For me, a spell is something that gives agency. I was thinking of that [in relation to] structures that you exist within; how they can restrict you, but how you can take agency within those circumstances by casting your intentions.”

In a way, this is what Hardy’s work has always been about: intentionality, the way our minds can simply but drastically alter how we see the world. “I’ve been trying to get to something which is quite precise, which has to do with a balance between something existing and having life, but also being quite fragile,” she says. “Perhaps that’s the sense of myself that I feel at the moment: that every moment is only that, that nothing really continues beyond the balance of those single moments of awareness of being.”