Anne Hardy: Rising Heat

Anne Hardy Maureen Paley

This is the fifth solo exhibition at Maureen Paley by Anne Hardy and her first in the gallery’s new project space Studio M, located in the Rochelle School on Arnold Circus in Shoreditch. The exhibition is scheduled to open to the public once the lockdown restrictions are eased and will be initially launched online and accompanied by a new video with Anne Hardy.

Presented in Studio M will be a selection of unique photograms that were produced in 2020 and form a new series titled The Depth of Darkness, the Return of the Light. The materials used in the production of these works were gathered from the River Thames foreshore while the artist was researching her 2019/2020 commission for Tate Britain, which took inspiration from the rhythms of the earth and the tides of the river in order to transform the façade of the building.[1] Working in an analogue photographic darkroom the artist has manipulated light over an arrangement of these objects that are at once the source and the outcome of her field research.

Anne Hardy came to prominence in the early 2000’s with her large-scale photographs that depicted constructed environments that were made privately in her studio. Over the years her working process has expanded to include the presentation of sound works, films, sculpture and the construction of immersive environments – FIELDworks – that can be accessed and experienced in life. The built structures that make up these environments utilise choreographed sequences of manipulated light, sound and air that are grounded in colour fields made from architectural forms. The starting point for these works is often the discovery of found or ‘lost’ objects, atmospheres and sounds that are collected and recorded in bypassed areas of the city such as the East London Docklands or the banks of the river Thames. Places she describes as ‘pockets of wild space … where loose-ends, feelings and thoughts collect’.[2] These elements become a sensory language that is used to describe a newly imagined landscape.

This working process is also played out in the quiet of the photographic darkroom, where the urban jetsam and street-combings that have been sourced while wandering in the city are manoeuvred in the dark under dialled in hues of coloured light to realise unexpected pictorial forms and colour fields, that are borne from fiction while rooted in reality. “The darkroom feels like a temporary suspension from the world, where momentary collisions between light, debris, paper and chemistry can conjure up unexpected and imagined spaces”.[3]

Duration 18 February 2021 - 04 April 2021
Times online
Cost Free
Venue Studio L / M, Rochelle School
Address Friars Mount House, 7 Playground Gardens
, London E2 7FA , ,
Contact +44 (0)20 7729 4112 / info@maureenpaley.com / www.maureenpaley.com

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