Anne Hardy is known for her large-scale installations where sound, objects, light, colour and drawing seem to take on a life of their own. She invites us to enter a ‘sentient space’ and to experience a work of art that slowly evolves around us. Materials can appear concrete and familiar, but everything feels slightly unreal. We are immersed in an artwork that speaks to all our senses.
The environments Anne Hardy constructs hover between depiction and abstraction – staging our encounters with these spaces through careful composition of physical and audio landscapes and precisely coordinated perspectives, creating a space that is at once functional and illusory.
This immersive ‘walk in’ FIELD work Falling and Walking [phhhhhhhhhhh phossshhhh crrhhhzzz mn huaooogh] was co-commissioned by Art Night and the Contemporary Art Society for Art Night in London 2017. 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. They have become essentially ‘ambiguous’ in the sense that they have the possibility of containing two or more ideas simultaneously. Hardy thinks about space in the same way; places can be both strange and familiar, floating between the real and the imaginary. They have something magical – something we have to experience but which is also hard to define. In Hardy’s own words: ‘they make us aware of the slippery nature of our perception of the world.’
