Though it looks like British photographer Anne Hardy has just stumbled on these abandoned rooms – a science lab, a basketball-littered storage cupboard, a dusty Christmas-tree filled living room – this is not the case at all.

Hardy has, in fact, spent months – two months for each set-up on average – sourcing each artifact, each decoration. That collection of weights and weightlifting trophies? A bounty of jumble sale finds. The derelict greenhouse, sanctioned by bio-hazzard tape? A mélange of second-hand pot plants and possessions from a particularly successful trip around the city skips. She’s spent hours moving each object maybe 5cm this way, 10cm that, to see where it perfectly fits. The seemingly accidental visual details – the clustering and stacking of things, the trodden-in dust and dirt are all her doing. Details in a larger story. A work of fiction.

“I see each work as creating a thinking space that the viewer can enter, and associate with and relate to – to relate back to the real world. It is important to me that this relationship exists, that somehow fiction can relate to and think about reality, that it’s not all just a fantasy,” Hardy says to Mooks about her forthcoming solo show at uber-cool London gallery Maureen Paley, where 6 new pictures include a crumbling black concrete debating chamber, a wire-caged terrarium, a subterranean wooden shack filled with explosive tubes and spent fireworks, and a sealed bright green suburban room connected to the outside world by CCTV and CB radio. But they are all, really, photos of her East End studio.

“I think to see the work as set design is to misunderstand it,” she says. “Although the work is of course visual and so how it looks is important, it’s not only about making something look like something, and it’s not a pre-considered design. I am interested in space itself as a subject, and one that we are all engaged in making.”

When setting up, Hardy is always planning the set as a photograph, setting up the scene from the point of view of the lens. “The camera is present from the beginning of the construction, so I consider it as an image all the way through the process,” Hardy says, before describing how she selects objects just by chance. “I suddenly notice them,” she says, “and I often trust that interest to lead me somewhere.” And then what happens to finds afterwards? “Everything is dismantled, I keep a lot of the objects and ‘stuff’ from each work, and recycle what I can of the building materials into the next pieces I make.  I don’t really have trophies. The objects take on a very intense and particular presence when they are part of a work which somehow disappears once they are just themselves again… though a lot of it stays in my cupboards!”

Anne Hardy’s solo show runs from 9 October to 22 November 2009 at Maureen Paley gallery.





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