LONDON.- 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 has launched online and accompanied by a new video with Anne Hardy.

Presented in Studio M is 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. 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’. 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”.

Anne Hardy lives and works in London, UK and will be included in British Art Show 9, 2021/2022 and will be a 2021 Artist in Residence, at Chinati Foundation, Marfa TX, USA. Solo exhibitions include The Depth of Darkness, the Return of the Light, Tate Britain Winter Commission, Tate Britain, London, UK and The Weather Garden, Anne Hardy curates the Arts Council Collection, Towner Gallery, Eastbourne, UK, 2019; Falling and Walking (phhhhhhhhhhh phosshhhhhcrrhhhhhzzz mn huaooogh), Leeds Art Gallery, Leeds, UK, Sensory Spaces #13, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, The Netherlands 2018; Falling and Walking (phhhhhhhhhhh phosshhhhhcrrhhhhhzzz mn huaooogh), Art Night 2017, co-commissioned by Art Night and The Contemporary Art Society, Nichols and Clarke Showrooms, London, UK, 2017; FIELD, Modern Art Oxford, Oxford, TWIN FIELDS, The Common Guild, Glasgow, rrmmmph, huooghg, op, mmmuuoow, ip , FIG-2, ICA studio, London, 2015; Fieldworks, Kunstverein Freiburg, 2014; Vienna Secession, 2012; New Acquisitions from the Arts Council Collection 2010, Anne Hardy — Recent Work, Project Space, Longside Gallery, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield, 2010. Selected group exhibitions include False Memory, Rugby Art Gallery, Rugby, UK and Ideas Travel Faster than Light, Mecklenburgh Square Garden Project 2020; Voici des fleurs, La Loge, Brussels, Belgium, Welcome to the Labyrinth, Marta Herford Museum for Art Architecture and Design, Herford, Germany, 2018; Portrait (for a Screenplay) of Beth Harmon, Tenderpixel, London, UK, 2017; The Day Will Come When Photography Revises, Triennial of Photography Hamburg, Kunstverein Hamburg, Germany, which toured to Landesgalerie Linz, Austria, 2015, and also Mirrorcity curated by Stephanie Rosenthal at The Hayward Gallery, London, 2014.