Anne Hardy works with photography and large-scale sculptural installation to create immersive and sensual environments, which she calls ‘Fieldworks’. These works combine found materials with light and sound to represent in-between, urban spaces where everyday detritus, atmospheres, and emotions, gather. Acting as a dream or spell, Hardy invites us to experience and revisit our relationships to the settings that we inhabit. Hardy’s immersive practice also extends to curation. In 2019, Towner Eastbourne invited Hardy to curate an exhibition of works from the Arts Council Collection. Inspired by the Zen gardens of Kyoto, The Weather Garden reimagined the gallery space as a shifting, impermanent landscape, creating a meditative environment with light sensors that fluctuated in response to local weather data. Hardy selected artists exploring the transformative potential of materials, the interaction of human, plant, and animal, and the slippages between animate and inanimate objects. Outlier (2023) is a wall sculpture that assembles found industrial elements, including knotted wire, nails, and drips of solder that are positioned alongside simultaneously familiar and unknown functional objects. Hardy sees it as a kind of mapping, calculating or meditating tool, with the gathered objects suggesting ways of understanding through the de/reconstruction of materials. Intentionally making it to feel precarious or fragile, Hardy presents a way to think about the fragility or temporary nature that any kind of understanding or resolution might have. The scruffs and marks that cover the work are ambiguous, as they resemble byproducts of movement or accidents rather than the intentional marks of the artist. The addition of the lit light bulb alludes to human activity and their responsibility for the gathering of objects assembled around it. Through these works Hardy creates surroundings to recognise as alternative landscapes rather than those sought out deliberately as picturesque, such as the South Downs - a repeated landscape in the Towner Collection. The addition of Outlier, to the Towner Eastbourne’s collection is a material contrast to these sublime painted scenes through its hard-edges, electricity and integral dust, all of which point to the redundant overlooked sites around the Towner Eastbourne’s day-to-day urban landscapes.
