Notes from London

Anne Hardy likes to play with the uncanny. Over two exhibition spaces, the British artist shifted from immersive environments and installations into something more pointed and figurative. She is interested in the fringes and edges of things and how that shows up in psychic and physical ways. Unafraid of creating liminal and ambiguous spaces, her installations are about emotional and visceral experiences and what is brought to these with one’s presence. So, there was a switch in this exhibition, with lone figures created out of Hardy’s clothing. With Being (Interloper), 2023-24, we see a mysterious hooded figure, extruding a metallic and bone tail, snaked by the surrounding earth. Both poignant and shamanistic, we are aware of a human form, elusive and possibly sinister, yet connected to natural forces. Being (Immaterial), 2023-24 was an assemblage of blue jeans, white pointy boots, and clouds of swirling fine wire replacing a head and torso. Fragments of stones formed patterns that resembled the skeletal bones of a hand, branches were placed on steel and polished pewter, with rusty metal and dried plants, all these pointing to a pulling back into the unknowable, trusting force of ‘nature.’ At a time of mass accountability, quantification, and data sets, it’s not a new sentiment, but very valid.