Anne Hardy

In 2026, British artist Anne Hardy will transform Talbot Rice Gallery’s iconic Georgian Gallery into an immersive space. Known for her pioneering approach to exhibition-making, Hardy treats the gallery as a found object, extending the influence of sculpture into the fabric of the gallery through light, sound, data and scenography, creating an active environment for a series of sculptural ‘beings’.

These new figurative sculptures are formed from an accumulation of cast elements, found materials, armatures and earth drawings, creating an energetic synthesis between the fragility and resilience of the human body, evolving technologies and the remnants of everyday life. Richly detailed and charged with presence, each figure appears to have a role to play or purpose for being.

At the centre of the installation a lone figure is kneeling, caught mid-gesture. She is forged from both complex sculptural processes and foraged, re-purposed materials, and is surrounded by earth drawings and objects that evoke ritual and transformation.

Hardy’s hybrid world fuses bronze and ceramic elements with worn clothing, rubber tubing and metal structures. Spinal scales are cast from studio detritus, while shimmering bronze branches are moulded from living versions of themselves. Both delicately beautiful and deeply unsettling, these sculptural beings suggest a future in which biological and technological evolution have become inseparable. Throughout the exhibition, communication is imagined as something transmitted through gesture, material, vibration and energy—where primal elements intersect with electronic frequencies. These compound forces resonate through the air, sound and light of the room.

Her newly commissioned sonic landscape communicates remnants of a world left desolate; gusts of wind through dry grasses, rain falling on concrete and the lonely voices of birds. It also crackles with another energy—of electric power, airborne signals and shifting frequencies attempting to tune into one another. In this both human and post-human landscape the imagination is discharged within a changing atmosphere.

The environment is illuminated by flickering light sculptures that seem to attune themselves to the internal world of Hardy’s sculptural beings. These lights are activated by weather data drawn from Marfa, Texas, where the artist first developed the sculptures that evolved into this new body of work. In Marfa, Hardy encountered an existence poised at the margins of constructed systems, one of both strength and fragility.

In this work, Hardy refers to “the evolving infiltration of artificial intelligence into our daily lives, and the future of our biological selves that have evolved overmillennia to give us complex, embedded, intuitive knowledge and instincts”. Imagining a form of future archaeology, the work also engages with the politics of display by grafting seemingly incompatible contexts onto another: a courtyard ruin into a gallery; fragile assemblages transformed into wild cast bronze; weather systems brought indoors; and humans, machines, birds and synthetic tones co-existing within a former natural history museum.

At the threshold of a paved environment are two sculptures, Being (Warrior) and Being (Guardian). Ambiguous in character - protectors, totems, warnings or maternal figures - they stand as the audience’s first encounter with Hardy’s imagined world, and perhaps its final remains.

Figures in sculpture have long possessed the ability to take flight in the imagination: from the tension of a body in contrapposto poised to uncoil, or a futurist form capturing movement through space. Through subtle scenography and immersive spatial composition, Hardy creates a world for us to encounter in which her sculptural beings appear, in her words, “sentient”—responsive, reverent and alive with energy.

Curated by Talbot Rice Gallery Director, Prof Tessa Giblin and presented in association with Edinburgh International Festival.

Supported by Edinburgh College of Art, Creative Scotland and Henry Moore Foundation, and part of Edinburgh Art Festival.

Anne Hardy is a British artist, whose recent exhibitions include Interloper, Visual, Carlow, 2026; Survival Spell, Maureen Paley, London, 2024; British Art Show 9, touring across UK, 2021/2022; Mario Merz Prize, Fondazione Merz, Turin, 2022; The Depth of Darkness, the Return of The Light, Tate Britain Winter Commission, 2019/20; CRAZY, Chiostro del Bramante, Rome, 2022; The Weather Garden, Towner Eastbourne, 2019; Sensory Spaces #13, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, 2018; Falling and Walking, ArtNight, London, 2017 and Leeds Art Gallery, 2018. In 2022 Hardy was artist in residence at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, and in 2025/6 at Cove Park, Scotland. Hardy’s works are held in major public collections including Tate, Leeds Art Gallery, Towner Eastbourne, The Box Plymouth, Victoria and Albert Museum, British Council, Government Art Collection, Arts Council Collection 

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Press contact: Melissa MacRobert melissa.macrobert@ed.ac.uk