Hardy’s spells are made from the bare essentials, they are landscapes where the mind and the world meet. «Survival Spell», the eponymous earthwork, is a curve of dirt on the floor, a gestural sweep that holds within and without its earthy-boundaries once-purposeful fragments. It sits awaiting disturbance, a clumsy foot would undo everything. Somehow it creates a field of energy that pushes back its observers with tenderness. «Survival Spell» was made during the artist’s 2022 residency at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas – a place where the light and horizon feel limitless, a one-crossroads town at the edges of the United States and the desert. It is an edge place with its own edges. Hardy swept earth, dug dirt from the backyard, recorded the sound of snow melting off the roof of the building where she slept, and gathered unwanted objects from the dump. These relics she combs into precise arrangements that vibrate beyond their material form – they are magic, they defy words, and they transform.

This book was published on the occasion of the exhibition Anne Hardy «Survival Spell» at Maureen Paley and Studio M, London 2024.