Anne Hardy

I was meant to be a scientist, but instead became an artist.

Life.

It is an involved process, and can take up to nine months to realise a single work. When I begin, I don’t know how the end result will be, as it’s the result of a process of working with materials, sounds, as well as the particular characteristics of the space the piece will exist in. I work on many elements throughout the development of the installation, but the work only gets finalised the moment I work directly in the space, as this is when I can determine the relationships between all the parts and how I want them to operate in relation to mine and other people’s bodies.

It became necessary for people to be inside my work, to live it as an experience that involves their body and senses directly, so that this can become something embedded into you directly through your physical and sensory experience.

These places are real. I think of them as a parallel reality – another version, or potential other version of the world we are part of everyday. They are composed of elements I find in pockets of wild space that sit next to our everyday spaces: sounds, materials, atmospheres. I see them as a kind of mapping process of these areas: ones that I think of as the soul of the city or place they are part of, where all the loose ends, feelings and thoughts collect. In a sense, these kind of spaces are ‘free’ or ‘wild’ and this is the atmosphere that I want to explore in my work, a place out of time that gives our imagination – and therefore, perhaps our souls – a different kind of agency to consider other possibilities for themselves.

It is an open and subjective space, since you bring your whole self with you when you enter. There is a feeling or atmosphere I hope you will feel though.

I think of the environments I create as sentient; I want them to have the sense that they are in some way alive – altering and changing – that they continue with their own rhythm and process separately from their relationship with you. The work uses physical elements that make you aware of how you move within them and which are meant to be gently destabilising. For example, the floor in the Boijmans Museum has been built with a subtle slope under the carpet that is hard to notice visually but that you can feel when you move around. I have also worked with a strong colour field to create a distinctive atmosphere. The audio – a quadraphonic score that I composed – surrounds you and is at times gentle and at others overwhelming. The lights also change throughout the score, creating an altering sense of space and atmosphere.

Removing your shoes creates a more intimate connection with the work. It makes you vulnerable and more sensitive; you become more part of the installation.

I find things in the places where I walk to research for my work. I see what comes and take it back to the studio. Often, I translate the things I work with by casting them in another material to make them both themselves but also absolutely not themselves at the same time.

I’d like to make a work in the desert.

I’m currently finishing my first short film, which will be shown at Maureen Paley in London, in a solo show opening on the 10th of April, and at a group show in La Loge, Brussels.