Tom Hardwick-Allan

The act of making is one of loss, it’s loss making — the more a work is actualised the less potential it has to be otherwise. Every step towards an apparently final form is a narrowing. I like a medium that involves the negation of itself, as it seems to embody this. Images rise to the surface regardless, they are relentless, like meaning, but can always be broken down again to activate any latent chemical potential that they might still contain.

They’re both rudimentary and somewhat archaic forms of reproduction, in which something is carried into and beyond its imprinted absence through inversion or reversion.

This 200 year old press would have been used to print broadsheets in its day. Technologically this process of print has entered its afterlife, and this machine stands, in its obsolescence, as an imprint of itself. There is something in the DNA of print which seems to predict this, since it involves a kind of ghost-work, the origin being visible only in the liquid approximation that holds its impression after brief contact between surfaces. The flightless bird that acts as counterweight atop the frame of the press recalls an even more distant means of sending messages, and becomes more symbolic for it. The presence of the machine is epic, it seems like a conduit to command from some distant place an unseen energy proportional to its own vast weight.

Trying to maintain a position on this threshold is a means of generating energy. There’s a friction that leads to fiction which can be fed back into the machination. Low Relief refers to the cast carvings, it’s a form that is defined by its flat back and lack of undercut, so it's always tapering towards you. It was popular before the onset of vanishing point perspective and has this tension between picture plane and actual depth. There are 27 hemispheres in the show which make up different arrangements and can be further divided into threes and nines, and each is a print of another. Anyway, this hemisphere is the most basic expression of the low relief form, it's the atomic point. Then Foil refers to a cluster of things, it’s a plot device by which a character is defined by its inverse, and also the trail that a hunted animal leaves through its environment. Then it comes in in a material way too, these different dimensions folding in on each other.

Bubbles within bubbles, these sub systems whose parameters are defined by crystalline code but contain a central unknown. Art making as a kind of device to evidence catchment, which finds analogy in these other disciplines. Metonym used as a structural principle, a way of maintaining motion across what is otherwise untouching. It’s just finding these slant rhymes and resonances, like augury informs art in that when you’re making something you’re trying to predict its future, and the implications that its eventual form might carry.

I wanted the presence of stacked books without the entrapment of legibility.  Like an unprinted print, something that is on the other side of perception, but reaching towards it. There’s something so tedious about being locked into comprehension. I’m used to relying on a density of visual information to charge a work, and I wanted to fold that in on itself. It felt like a strange thing to do, to wrap every book I own in this distressed glassine paper and stack them on sheets of foil from sweet, crisp and cigarette packets, but the work has a central mystery to it for me and I wanted to preserve this. It’s called Secret of the Fruitfly. So it’s not for me to fully know. I started handling them with oil and graphite on my hands, which picked up the webbed folds of the paper and became a new articulation. To this end I started treating them as paintings, so the context of understanding started to shift. A lot of these books informed the exhibition somehow too, so now they’re a kind of congealed fuel.

The crows weren’t pets so much as arrivals, the first arrived on my 20th birthday and refused to leave for six years before one day disappearing. Then the next one arrived on Christmas just afterwards. Same thing happened with a kestrel. All these birds were flightless and must’ve been imprinted by humans and were seeking us out as their own. But we also imprint onto them, a silhouette of a bird is just so neat, in terms of shape: head and beak, or wing, but it’s never neutral now. There’s something about an image and the actuality that it entraps. It’s an oscillation. Sometimes The Real does hop in through the back door, but its rupture is only bearable for an instant.

Imprinting is this early behavioural phenomenon, first observed in birds, in which an infant imprints onto whatever it is apparently raised by. It’s a process of identifying an emergent self with the shape of the thing in front of it. So I’m drawing a link between this and printmaking, which is also about the dissemination of information via moments of intense contact. This is an expanded printmaking, which contains the social, imprinting is not something that happens once but an ongoing process that we can’t help but be engaged in.

History is a fantasy that dictates the parameters of the present. Real change seems impossible now, but history is still moot and may in its shifting contain keys that could unlock some current deadlock. Iron is a liquid which is frozen every so often to satisfy the whims of an epoch, it knows more in its essence than its frozen forms could represent.

I hope for an exhibition to be active, with work that has a presence like a good performer might, though it has a different kind of duration, and will release itself at a slower pace. But there’s a subtle ecstasy particular to still things in a room, poised against time.

This trajectory kind of began with me making woodcut prints for gig posters and that, using highlighters to demarcate different areas to cut then printing in black ink. Then I got more interested in the blocks themselves, these unpleasant colours bleeding into the grain of the wood and the potential of its unprinted surface. These became reliefs as I dug deeper into them, revealing more layers of plywood that gave the appearance of tree rings, as if the wood was dreaming of its own predigested form. I was missing the binary of print but wanted to keep pushing these carvings, so the iron suggested itself.

I think it’s more textual. That’s what the sonic and visual share for me, how the surface grain describes what something is made of. Maybe that’s where composition comes in, like what something is composed of, and slicing it at different intervals to reveal where it has complicated or become cancerous. I guess that’s what becomes rhythm, when something has to be cut.

Inasmuch as we are engaged with these things daily, maybe without naming it. It’s all magical thinking, anything with language. These systems we live by are shared delusions. But maybe art making is a way of doing what we’re doing anyway but with a kind of consciousness that estranges it. It pivots between extreme abstract belief and doubt.

Time became a material, I had to do weird things to shape it in a way that held things here now, rather than there later. The heightened intensity made it easier to feel alive in the present too, like what I imagine riding a motorbike to feel like, decision and result become almost inseparable.

It took a long time to get past the Bronze Age when casting these works. Iron melts at about 200 degrees higher and it’s intense to sustain that kind of temperature. Despite its heaviness it’s quite weak, which I like. I identify with it as an auto-immune material, without being sealed it would eat itself through given enough time. Historically it’s interesting because it really accelerated these points of crux, like the onset of agriculture and the industrial revolution, but it couldn’t sustain them, buckling under the weight of what it enabled. I was thinking about the whole process as a kind of reverse alchemy.

I keep coming back to this kind of metaphysical straining, however much I try to move on.

On April fools day there was a performance night that descended the levels outside the gallery. The theme was reverse alchemy, trying to hone into that. Fake fire, real smoke.

Well now I’ve got all this dust, from wood and iron and graphite and time. And hundreds of foils from crisp, sweet and cigarette packets. So there might be something to do with what’s left. There’s an urge to inscribe. I want something hovering and slight that creases like a smile or a question.