Feelings: Anne Hardy at Talbot Rice Gallery

Anne Hardy’s exhibition ‘Feelings’ in the Georgian Gallery at Talbot Rice, is the one most linked to its past as the University of Edinburgh’s Natural History Museum. Hardy makes use of the mausoleum-like qualities of the architecture; the high ceilings with glazed cupolas, viewing points from the balcony above the tall exhibits, and recessed enclaves for smaller chorus-like exhibits upstairs. Hardy’s work immediately, by its presence, asks questions about the histories inherited by the gallery from its nineteenth century neoclassical origin. It’s in the heart of the University, and in the shared or overlapping histories of the art gallery and the academic collections of preserved natural exhibits long-since relocated to the National Museum of Scotland.

‘Feelings’ developed out of two residencies, the first at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas (2022), the second at Cove Park, in Argyll in Scotland (2026). Both sites submit to the overwhelming landscapes in which they are situated, and work with the weather and seasons rather than against them. Hardy’s exhibition brings in the raw elements of nature to support her mysterious narrative.

In the centre of the gallery is a large breeze block dais, populated by humanoid figures Hardy calls ‘Beings’ and by glyphs drawn very precisely with earth and only really visible from above. Tree branches or bronze cast from branches add to the visual language. It looks somewhere between a stage and a landing strip. Being (Warrior) (2026) and Being (Guardian) (2026) act like sentries or the greeting party of an alien species. Being (Warrior) has a head repurposed from a moped helmet which transforms it into a Thundercat or a superhero. Being (Guardian) is totemic and is supported by a platform made from old copies of the New York Times and green blown glass rhomboids.

Anne Hardy’s work seems to have journeyed on a long arc, from photography and film, to the screens and mise-en-scène that formed the infrastructure for that work, to installations of artefacts which subsume the viewer within a speculative fiction. These artefacts describe the world in its mystery but leave it exactly as it is. Hardy is very good at returning value to objects and materials which have been discarded and ignored, and derives meaning from the waste grounds and fly tipping sites which most of us shy away from. These are the places where the wind blows things of no purpose and where they collect as inconsequential jetsam at the moment their meaning erodes. Hardy makes these places crossing points between realms: from yesterday to today, from purpose to detritus, from whole to partial, from daylight to dreaming.

Anne Hardy creates a speculative fiction from these interstitial elements. Most of the content in the exhibition falls between one state and another, between one realm and another. Some of the materials in the construction of the works are raw: soil, volcanic rock, the unmediated sounds of a thunderstorm. There are materials which require transformation such as metal alloys, jesmonite, glass and ceramic. These processes of transformation have names which suggest alchemy and other cunning crafts: wild casting, earthing, energy drawings. The elements which make up the works are given narrative descriptors such as ‘abandoned concrete from the transient zone,’ ‘hunted objects,’ ‘exploded energy discs,’ ‘things that hands pulled open,’ and ‘organised chaos.’ Rather than dump a volume of the natural world in the gallery, as for instance what Walter De Maria did with The New York Earth Room (1977), Hardy puts all these elements through which the base materials are transformed. It seems to be a consciously magical process, and one where even the chance findings of street detritus which is incorporated into the works is led by some intention or a greater meaning. Hardy calls these found things ‘thought drops,’ but whose thoughts they embody and who dropped them is unclear.

‘Feelings’ is populated by human figures who are both present and absent. They have human or humanoid form and wear clothes which are mostly Anne Hardy’s, but they are shrouded and bodyless. They share with other objects in the exhibition a sense of supernatural purpose. Being (Guardian) acts as sentinel at the entrance while Being (Interloper) seems to have drifted across time and space and has a long prehensile tail adapted from ‘tin cans crushed by trucks outside the studio.’ Both angelic and sinister, these figures have the uncanny desiccated form of mummies which have been preserved by weather and other natural means, and their costumes seem to be vestiges of an extinct civilisation, maybe this one.

Hardy’s Beings are linked by drawings made with soil which she calls Earth Energy Drawings. The artist is harnessing a raw telluric power which is also at work in the complex soundscape which generates the atmosphere in which the visitor experiences the exhibition. This sonic landscape features field recordings of rain, of wind through dried grass, and an electrical crackle which could be the static between long wave radio stations or the data from seismographs or weather transmitters. All of this points to the confluence of older and newer ways of understanding the natural world, and to technology which drowns out intuitive interpretation as a guide towards meaning and relevance. It is a picture of the interference which now complicates communication.

It is this radical juxtaposition of elements that gives Anne Hardy’s work its power. She works in a genealogy of art practice through which invisible forces are made apparent. Her most recent exhibition at Maureen Paley was called ‘Survival Spell’ and there seem to be more spells at work here.⁰¹ One of the works in the central installation at Talbot Rice is called Wand (Empress Tree) (2025). It is the thin branch of a tree stood upright as if it were planted in the earth. It acts as aerial, wand, lightning rod. It is not the actual branch but, seemingly, a direct bronze cast from the original wooden branch itself. There are also dowsing rods in a piece called Diviner (Empress Tree) (2026) another bronze cast likely using the same technique, and a piece called Universe (organised chaos) (2025–26) which incorporates a ‘signal aerial’ without changing its purpose. The term ‘universe’ is applied to a number of the works shown on the upstairs balcony, all of which seem to be nets woven to catch energies.

But what is the purpose of the Beings in this real and imagined world, both themselves and standing in for another, implicit and also part of a fiction? Being (Interloper) (2022–24) was shown previously in the ‘Survival Spell’ exhibition and comes from the artist’s 2022 residency at the Chinati Foundation mentioned earlier in this review. The work’s title suggests the figure has arrived from another planet, like The Man Who Fell To Earth in Walter Tevis’s novel,⁰² or is someone lost in a system in which their beliefs leave them outcast, like K in Franz Kafka’s novel The Castle whose landlady defines him with the line ‘You’re not from the castle, you’re not from the village, you’re nothing’.⁰³ They are lonely figures, made lonelier by the atmosphere created by the sound work which defines their context along with the LED strip light programme which dims and brightens in response to meteorological data from Marfa.

There was an extraordinary storm in Edinburgh the night after I saw the exhibition. In the early hours of the morning lightning lit up the sky over and over again. It was impossible to sleep through. But shouldn’t a thunder and lightning storm wake you up? It would be a detached and disenchanted world that wasn’t interrupted by lightning and the sound of rain.