Andrew Hardwick

Hardwick’s work is landscape based and looks at strange wilderness zones, including both natural and man-made. His paintings both play with, and subvert, traditional ideas of romantic landscape painting and the sublime. The images look at edge-land zones around big industrial ports, such as large-scale car storage compounds, redundant factories and polluted waste lands.

His work also looks at the more poetic wilderness zones like those of Dartmoor and Bodmin Moor. However, these are also polluted with reminders of the contemporary influence on the landscape. Roads predominate in crossing the moor, a narrow road is etched into an otherwise massive moorland triptych, likewise a real car radiator sits in the painting’s distant barrow. Toy cars, seemingly in their hundreds, form an image of a car storage compound at Royal Portbury Dock.

Layered landscapes are also a theme in Hardwick’s work. In terms of texture the paintings are heavily layered with different types of paint, plaster, plastics, soils, pigments, roofing felt, hay and other unconventional materials. To this rich surface relevant artefacts are often added, creating reminders or triggering memories intrinsic to a particular landscape.

The idea of creating layers in the landscape is partly a result of the artist’s childhood, during which his family’s farm was first sliced in half by the M5 motorway and then again by the Royal Portbury Dock. The land once filled with sheep has become a pure edge-land wilderness with detritus of the developments now filling the land.

All of Hardwick’s work makes reference to ideas of change, memory, history and emotion. Often the landscape’s story and journey is purposely unclear. Yet, redolent throughout his work is the notion that we are but another layer in time

@andrewhardwickart

andrewhardwick.com

Gallery Images (from left) 

1. Moorland Reservoir 160x401cms

2. Night Passage 124x244cms

3. Waste Land and Road 2048x1536cms

4. Phantom Ship and Saltings 186x370cms

5. Bulldosed Tree and Next Reformed in Studio 

6. Burning Hedges 112x240cms

7. Conifer Wood Installation 

8. Concrete Floor and Sheep Track 

9. Anima Mundi Last of the Silence

10. Exhibition in Bridport 

11. Depot Warehouse, Low Sun 111x332cms

12. Estuary and Iceberg 87x153cms

13. Estuary, Sheep, Dull Day and M4 South Wales 

14. Exhibition at Anima Mundi November 2022

15. Forgotten Land Invite 

16. Leaving Avonmouth and Orange Sunset 64x87cms

17. Painting View at the RA
18. Strange Island 180x240cms 

19. Winter, Mist, Distant Factories and Sheep 98x187cms