The Weather Garden, Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne, UK

9th February 2019 – 2nd June 2019

Anne Hardy curates the Arts Council Collection.

British artist Anne Hardy curates the Arts Council Collection in Towner’s eighth and final exhibition as part of the Arts Council Collection National Partners Programme 2016-19. Anne Hardy’s work derives from places she calls ‘pockets of wild space’ – gaps in the urban space where materials, atmospheres, and emotions gather – using what she finds there to manifest sensory and unstable installation works that fully immerse you. Hardy brings this approach to her selection for Towner, envisioning the gallery space as a shifting impermanent landscape, a meditative environment shaped by local weather data, which has been translated into gently fluctuating light. The floor has been reimagined as an oversized plinth of breeze blocks which supports both the artworks and visitors.

The garden is frequently a metaphor or stand-in for a larger world beyond – it can be a meditative, experimental, unfamiliar, and transformative space, it can also be a form of image. The contents of the garden may not always be natural, but rather other versions or alternate visions of the world that help us to re-approach that world when we leave a poetic imaginary potential of shifted realities. The Weather Garden encompasses over thirty artworks in a diverse range of media by artists include: Roger Ackling, Claire Barclay, Becky Beasley, Appau Jnr Boakye-Yiadom, Claude Cahun, Lynn Chadwick, Alice Channer, Lygia Clark, Thomas Joshua Cooper, Jane Coyle, Hubert Dalwood, Rita Donagh, Barry Flanagan, John Gibbons, Shirazeh Houshiary, Kim Lim, Sarah Lucas, Lucia Nogueira, Madeleine Pledge, Ima-Abasi Okon, Margaret Organ, Karin Ruggaber, Veronica Ryan, Sebastian Thomas, Edward Weston and Cathy Wilkes.