This expanded environmental photographic work from the artist’s ‘folding, faulting, uplift’ series 2024-25, was exhibited at Photo Fringe 2024’s Collectives Showcase in Brighton with the London Alternative Photography Collective’s curated Symbiosis III exhibition, which ran from Oct 4th – Nov 17th. The work contains analogue silver gelatin prints whose negatives were captured on location in East Lothian, Scotland, with pinhole cameras made from household waste and a mid century 35mm SLR camera. The darkroom prints were created using homemade seaweed developer foraged carefully from the beach sites. These chosen locations are close to the birthplace of John Muir, founder of environmental conservation and the USA’s National Parks System. This long form site specific series explores our increasingly fragile environmental & political landscape through the lens of Muir and Scottish Enlightenment figure James Hutton whose coastal geological discovery, close to Muir’s later birthplace, redated the earth as vastly older, more complex and interconnected than previously understood. The series’ title takes it’s name from this geological find. Both are framed through the existing, haunting fragments of WW2 coastal defense anti-tank concrete blocks which formed colossal chains, built by ordinary hands, to repel the then very real threat of Nazi invasion. The delicate silk woven through the layered folds of chemigram prints, which were made with plants found within and around from sites, is the tie from a WW2 period women’s indoor house coat.
‘UNDER, B E T W E E N, (after before) Image 1’ Silver gelatin & plant based developer print, 2024. © Wendy I Hardie
‘UNDER, B E T W E E N (after before) Image 2’. Silver gelatin & plant based developer print, 2024. © Wendy I Hardie
‘UNDER, B E T W E E N (after before) Image 3’. Silver gelatin & plant based developer pinhole camera print, 2024. © Wendy I Hardie
Wendy Hardie’s ‘UNDER, B E T W E E N (after before)’ Itn. II from the artist’s ‘folding, faulting, uplift’ expanded environmental photography series 2024-25 (RHS) and Ed Sykes ‘Rock’ (LHS).
Wendy Hardie Artist - Selected Works 