Andrew Hardwick 'The Last of the Silence'

a n d r e w h a r d w i c k

t h e l a s t o f t h e s i l e n c e

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“Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the

last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of

the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our

paved roads through the last of the silence.”

Wallace Stegner, The Sound of Mountain Water

This is Andrew Hardwick’s fifth solo exhibition at

Anima Mundi. Hardwick’s sedimentary paintings display

his captivation with ever decreasing wilderness zones;

both natural and man-made. Playing with and subverting

traditional notions of romantic landscape painting and

the sublime.

Hardwick draws partial inspiration from a specifically

intimate relationship with location. This deep rooted

understanding is cultivated in no small part through his

idiosyncratic heritage where the family farm adjoined

the Bristol Channel and included a large acreage of tidal

salt marshes in the Portishead area of Bristol. The farm

was first sliced in half by the M5 motorway and then

again by the Royal Portbury Dock. Hardwick’s personal

landscape, as with many across the country and further

afield, continues to experience dramatic transition. In

a very literal sense Hardwick has witnessed his personal

history and the intertwined landscape of his childhood,

become fractured and buried, in his case beneath a

colossal car park where the family sheep once roamed.

Remaining land now mostly awaits development, with

hedges gone, marker posts installed, given up by its

more recent custodians. Much of this land is now so

heavily polluted that it could not be used for crops,

so sits, fenced off, awaiting. In this strange transient

zone, nature begins to temporarily reclaim, yet the

construction of new massive depot Warehouses

continues to proliferate, obliterating further. This same

area is infused by the estuarial light of the nearby brown

sea, no doubt coloured by countless years of pollution

from its industrial neighbours. This new world, as is its

rapacious tendency, has swallowed up the old.

Hardwick paints these landscapes that he sees but also

the one that he remembers. Etched with those long

gone sheep who were once herded on the saltings

and ships once witnessed, now rotting or scrapped.

These ghost like paintings often depict these edge-land

zones where other works draw inspiration from the

more typically idyllic locations such as coast line and

moorland. However, even these landscapes are filled

with subtle reminders of human interference. This is a

notion ever present throughout Hardwick’s paintings,

where either the stark presence of the modern makes

itself unambiguously known or where something deeply

mournful lurks beneath a seemingly quiet, lyrical

pastoralism. In all cases, the artists life, and mortality

become fused with the fragility of his surroundings,

both of which are becoming increasingly impeded

upon. However there remains a sentimental ‘tug of

war’ where in palpable contrast, past human intervention

becomes submerged by the terrain which surrounds

them. The intrusive impact of what was once

claimed by ‘the modern world’, now disintegrates

and becomes entombed. For example sites which

had earlier been the location of army camps and gun

placements during the war now physically fade along

with their memory. So perhaps all is fleeting, as the

passing of time and the earth itself seem to engulf all

that temporarily sit upon it - adding to its delicate layers

of geology. So what is perhaps most at risk of loss

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along the way is not only ourselves but our relationship

to our earth for the time that we have here.

In 1900, Ferdinand Hodler described landscape

painting as “the expression of pantheistic communion

with nature, an attempt to express the whole of nature

as experienced through the simplest pictorial means.”

Hardwick also presents man through his separation

from nature, acknowledging this more modern and

supposedly enlightened position or condition. One of

the criticism faced by landscape painting is that through

it we are experiencing the artists version of nature as

opposed to nature herself, where artist’s ego competes

with the unbridled beauty of the natural world; this

objective sets up a competition with the muse, wrangling

with it for supreme evocation of the majestic. However

Hardwick’s paintings subvert these notions by laying

them bare, the experiences of mankind’s mark made

tussles with nature for omnipotence. Man’s ego is

knowingly presented versus the power of nature to

reclaim, albeit with time.

Hardwick’s medium of working is also atypical, pushing

what a painting can be. Works are heavily layered

using peoples left overs - things found, traces from

and surplus to the modern need, with different types

of paint (often sourced from recycling centres or

skips), plaster, plastics, ash, soils, pigments, felt,

geotextile membrane, hay and other unconventional

materials. To the resultant rich, delicate and seductive

surface relevant artefacts are often added, creating

reminders, triggering memories or reflecting fears

intrinsic to a particular landscape. What results reflects

the confusion, complexity and renewal which mirrors

both the landscape and our own existence. The exquisite

subtlety of colour and tone built within the surface is

often contrasted by visceral rawness, appearing almost

as if attacked, with indiscriminate fervour, evoking

the unsentimentality of nature and reinforceing the

ecological abandon of mankind too.

Hardwick’s entire oeuvre makes reference to concepts

of change, memory, history, emotion and transience.

That which appears delicate perhaps acknowledges

much considered ecological fragility, but a weight and

mass, places emphasis with the monumental, elemental

power that the earth has over us, despite the allusion of

our present power over it. We are just another layer in

time and the archeology of the earth. If these paintings

are to be seen as mournful then that which we mourn

is perhaps our own loss of intimacy with our natural

surroundings and our own temporary stain made.

However, we also bare witness to natures raw and

elemental beauty, through gestural power and her subtle

hue. Through confrontation to our ego, she reminds us

that some things are much bigger than we are and that

some things are more enduring. The consequence of our

contemporary concerns may become inconsequential in

the long tun. I find that there is some hope in that.

Joseph Clarke, 2022

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Ghost Ship

mixed media . 41 x 50 cm

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5

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Twilight


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Island, Estuary


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Estuary, Dull Day & Sewer Pipe

mixed media

. 103 x 230 cm

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Moor, Cloud & Rain


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Autumn Moor


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Brown Estuary & Cove


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Brown Moor, Summer

mixed media

. 31 x 45 cm

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Moor, Summer Shower


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Quarry, Moor & Autumn Sky


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Moor, Valley & Road


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Wind, Cloud, Moor

mixed media

. 98 x 162 cm

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Stream, Valley & Clouds


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Old Workings, Moor

mixed media

. 87 x 123 cm

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Gorse Bush, Wilderness


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Moor, Winter Light


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Moor


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Mists & Marker Posts (Forbidden Land)

mixed media

. 124 x 240 cm

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Wilderness & Three Wind Turbines (Avonmouth Crucifixion)


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Plane, Clouds, Estuary


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Winter Morning, Gas Power Station, Avonmouth


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Plasterboard Factory, Night, Portbury Docks


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Old Army Building Near Docks, Snow


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Snowstorm, Green Warehouse & Sheep


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Avonmouth Copse (Before Building Work)


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Burning Hedges


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Yellow & Blue Sky, Bush


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Red Estuary Sunset


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Three Oil Tanks


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40 56

Oil Storage Depot, Mustard Sky

mixed media

. 115 x 301 cm

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Andrew Hardwick is a British landscape artist born in Bristol, England in 1961 where he still resides on a

smallholding near Royal Portbury Docks. He is an elected Academician at the Royal West of England Academy and

has featured in five solo exhibitions at Anima Mundi since 2011. Works have been exhibited extensively including

numerous public shows most recently ‘Earth Digging Deep in British Art 1781-2022’, alongside Lamorna Birch,

William Blake, John Constable, Thomas Gainsborough, William Henry Hunt, Richard Long, John Martin, David Nash,

John Nash, Paul Nash, Samuel Palmer, John Piper, Yinka Shonibare, Stanley Spencer, Graham Sutherland and J. M.

W. Turner among others. Works can be found in collections worldwide.

ART EDUCATION

1992 – 95 BA (Hons) Fine Art, University of the West of England, Bristol

1995 – 97 MA Fine Art, University of Wales, Cardiff, Wales

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

2022 The Last of the Silence (Solo), Anima Mundi, St Ives

Earth: Digging Deep in British Art 1781-2022, Royal West of England Academy, Bristol

Forgotten Land (Solo), The Spring, Havant

Wilderness and Warehouses (Solo), Cornerstone Arts Centre, Didcot

2021 Bath Society of Artists, Victoria Gallery, Bath

2020 Ground (solo), Colston Yard, Bristol

2019 Emerging Landscapes, Royal West of England Academy, Bristol

Summer Show, Royal Academy, London

Edgelands (solo), Stockport War Memorial Art Gallery, Stockport

Edgelands (solo), Atkinson Gallery, Millfield, Street

2018 Fragmented Land (solo), Ruskin Mill, Nailsworth

2017 Explorations of the Sky, Royal West of England Academy, Bristol

Wilderness (solo), South Hill Park, Bracknell

Remnant (solo), North Wall Arts Centre, Oxford

2016 Palimpsest (solo), Anima Mundi, St Ives

Summer Show, Royal Academy, London

2015 Scarred Wilderness (solo), Millennium, St Ives

2014 The Power of the Sea, Royal West of England Academy, Bristol

Material Gesture (solo), Sidcot Arts Centre, Sidcot

2013 Moor (solo), Millennium, St Ives

2011 Evanescent Earth (solo), Millennium, St Ives

2010 Tidal Wilderness (solo), Victoria Art Gallery, Bath

Autumn Show, Royal West of England Academy, Bristol

2009 Where the Sea Meets the Estuary (solo), Burton Art Gallery, Bideford

2008 Estuary (solo), Newport Museum & Art Gallery, Newport

2007 Atruim Gallery (solo), Bournmouth University, Bournemouth

2006 Forgotten Ground (solo), Central Art Gallery, Ashton-under-Lyne

2005 Fragmented Land (solo), Folkestone Museum and Art Gallery, Folkstone

2004 Between Land and Tide (solo), South Tipperary Arts Centre, Clonmel, Ireland

Partial View curated by Matthew Collins, Hot Bath Gallery, Bath

2003 Veiled Earth (solo), Otter Gallery, University College Chichester

2001 Earth, Sea and Sky (2 person), Kirkby Gallery, Liverpool

2000 Between Land and Water (solo), The Phoenix Gallery, Brighton

1999 Elemental Dynamics (solo), Flax International Arts Centre, Belfast

Transient Land (solo), The Viewpoint Gallery, Plymouth College of Art, Plymouth

1997 Deluge (solo), Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff

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Published by Anima Mundi to coincide with Andrew Hardwick ‘The Last of the Silence’

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or

by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publishers

Photography by Cameron Clarke

Anima Mundi . Street-an-Pol . St. Ives . Cornwall . +44 (0)1736 793121 . mail@animamundigallery.com . www.animamundigallery.com

www.animamundigallery.com

Andrew Hardwick 'The Last of the Silence'

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