Anne Hardy FRSS

Anne Hardy’s large-scale sculptural installations, ‘FIELDWORKS’, combine physical materials with light and sound to create immersive and sensual environments. These works derive from places she calls ‘pockets of wild space’ – gaps in the urban space where materials, atmospheres, and emotions gather.  Hardy thinks of these works as moments out of time – voids within the ‘everyday’ space, that act as a spell or dream in which to re-encounter our relationships to the worlds that we inhabit. 

In 2022 Anne Hardy was artist in residence at The Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, USA, developing a new body of work "Survival Spell".

"Anne Hardy gathers leftovers sourced from the peripheries—
from the edges of capitalism—into sculptural cosmologies. Each is in a fragile balance, one that holds itself in the present tense. What makes the present visible is the invisibility of the future, the impossibility of seeing what comes next. Hardy’s sculptures show how the world is put together, and they are invitations to stop,
to look, to look again. This is an exhibition of survival spells, of alchemical accumulations where the mind and body meet. " Lisa Le Feuvre 2024. 

For Hardy 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.” Anne Hardy 2024

Anne Hardy has had exhibitions at major institutions in the UK and Europe, including Tate Britain, London, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Fondazione Merz, Turin, Hayward Gallery, London and Secession, Vienna. Hardy has also been invited to curate exhibitions including an invitation to work with the Arts Council Collection, where she created a site specific sensory installation, ‘The Weather Garden’ at Towner Art Gallery, UK, 2019. In 2021/22 Hardy’s work was included in the landmark touring exhibition British Art Show 9 and in 2022 she was nominated for the Mario Merz Prize. Also in 2022 Hardy was artist in residence at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, USA.

Recent exhibitions and commissions include ‘Survival Spell’ Maureen Paley, London (solo) 2024; British Art Show 9 (group) 2021/2022; Mario Merz Prize, Fondazione Merz (group) 2022; ‘The Depth of Darkness the Return of The Light’ Tate Britain Winter Commission, (solo) 2019/20; CRAZY, curated by Danilo Eccher at Chiostro del Bramante,Rome, (group) 2022; ‘Sensory Spaces #13, Liquid Landscape’, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Netherlands (solo) 2018, Museum Marta Herford Museum, Germany (group) 2018, ‘Falling and Walking’ at Leeds Art Gallery (solo) 2018 and ArtNight, London (solo) 2017.

Hardy’s works are held in major public collections including; Tate, Leeds Art Gallery, Towner Eastbourne, The Box, Plymouth, Victoria and Albert Museum, British Council, and Arts Council Collection.