Extended Statement, 2025:

Based in both London & east coast Scotland, I am an emerging fine art expanded photographer & curator using alternative & historic analogue processes that embed installation, sculpture and performative elements within the work. Working on & with the land with a deep enduring respect, my work focuses on human narratives, individual & collective, in relationship to our now critically fragile environment in the Anthropocene era. My practice analyses, interrogates & viscerally revisualizes in an attempt to better explore & understand a significantly more porous & delicately interwoven planet & to share that journey of seeing at greater depth with an open audience. It is also an emphatic celebration & expression of the psychological & spiritual power landscape & nature bestows on us & a visual exploration into finding significantly more sustainable & relevant ways to sensitively harness that sublime power. I am increasingly working with plants to find more sustainable photographic processes to do this as well as carefully considering the circularity of my practice.

I have had a multi award winning environmental art practice with art in architecture & landscape architecture collaborations with London based Architecture & Urban Design Studio, Landolt + Brown, working alongside director Adam Brown on a number of competitions & complex, bespoke public commissions in some of the most creative quarters in London. My past practice has spanned installation, land art, early pop up, son et lumiere, abstract painting, screen printing & sculpture, with experimental photography at their heart. These elements come into serious play with my expanded photography practice.

Of huge creative significance & inspiration, I grew up on a farm. My father, grandfather (also a WW2 era market gardener – decaying, nature engulfed greenhouses the origin of my obsession with plate glass) and great grandfather, small but committed tenant farmers on the east coast of Scotland, by the tree lined, clay earth edges of the River Tay. This instilled in me a profound & deeply embedded connection with vernacular landscape & nature & ultimately a deep, visceral drive to express & explore those ties & their broader cultural narratives. For me the farm was an intense, theatrical & creative arena. It compressed, cross-contaminated & cross-fertilized industrialization, domesticity, nature & history across porous boundaries, right on my door. As a child this mesmerising, interactive theatre was forensically & intimately explored, osmotically imbibed.  As an adult I came to realise it had permanently & intrinsically formed the way I look at the world & ultimately the way I create.

I followed my multidisciplinary farm education with another extended family legacy, architecture, with Edinburgh University BArch followed by post grad studies on the Polytechnic of East London’s alternative & progressive 2yr Arch. Dip II course, which based its teaching model on the Architectural Association’s innovative & intimate model of teaching through small chosen units. For my unit the course included, as instigator of our final dip II project, a 2 month live/work residency as part of ‘La Premiere Rue’; with the occupation of the first 2 interconnected levels of Le Corbusier’s then abandoned, semi derelict Unite D’Habitation located just outside Briey, in North East France. Raised up on sliced concrete piloti, the monumentally sculptural & raw building was immersed within a forest, like an ocean going steam liner, half below, half above the tree line, high above a river with mines under it’s undulating forest roots. With this raw constructed state & visceral arboreal landscape yoked to a post industrial history (one I had enormous affinity for & connection to already), & this model of teaching alongside a small group of international AA students, it too profoundly shaped my aesthetic & conceptual development.

Photography has been a very important part of my life since childhood. My father was a keen & good amateur landscape & family photographer & liked to entertain us with regular curated slideshows. I picked up his old SLR camera & started creatively photographing the farm & surrounding landscape around 15yrs of age & did black & white photography evening classes before going to university. In my post grad studies there was a significant step change where photography became a critical, experimental, embedded component of my creative process. It became my ‘sketchbook’, a conceptual tool & form of abstract expression, developing ideas & spatial forms, exploring interiority & extending sensory & psychological terrains, a methodology that I strongly & instinctively gravitated to. Almost from the outset, which put me in the camp of artist rather than architect, I was compelled to invest my architectural work, & subsequent 2D & 3D spatial art, with psychological, physical, narrative, hyper contextual, memory based residue. I believe the intensely visceral, immersive, naturally investigative, emotionally charged spatial life I had growing up on the farm as a creative, sensitive child instinctively pushed me to do this. During my post grad & as part of my thesis, I looked in depth to specific fields of contemporary art (land art, abstract painting, conceptual & installation art), symbolist poetry, philosophy & landscape & abstract photography, alongside the profoundly inspirational, complexly layered touchstone work of Italian architect Carlo Scarpa, to inspire & enable me to develop ways of embedding contextual, metaphorical & conceptual language into permanent & temporary built or assembled three dimensional form.  This approach has both informed & been immersed within my multi disciplinary environmental art practice throughout my career, which has included largescale, experimental, temporary urban & interior narrative led installations & son et lumiere (at the forefront of the UK pop up movement), abstract landscape painting on canvas & plate glass, glass & textile sculpture, photographic screen printing of trees & landscapes on textiles, glass & paper, complex art-architecture & landscape architecture collaborations, many of which have been yoked to experimental analogue & digital photography series as creative enablers.  Just as often my photographic series, which until recently have mainly been more private bodies of work, are end works in their own right, with an intense focus on abstraction that brings more clarity, oxygen and impetus to the way I see, feel, process & nurture things that matter to me: the imbuing of the constructed & natural environment we live in & shape, & the artwork we create with poetic sensitivity, layered analytical complexity & reflexive imagination, & our psychological & physical health acknowledged, strengthened & respected through creative acts & the arts infrastructure.  

Light, glass, translucence, textiles & folded, layered, metaphorical structures aligned with visceral, painterly abstraction through raw materiality, both natural & manmade, are long term material & structurally figurative approaches I use to explore my core subjects of environmental fragility, our deep interconnectedness with, & physical & spiritual need for the natural world around us, our innate human vulnerability & complexity & the ability to embed & conceptually externalise some of these layered narrative fragments & personal & historic residues of memory through spatial & material figuration & image making. Trees & the immediate earth they inhabit, life sustaining muses, have been my most abiding subjects throughout my career, explored, conceptually interpreted & celebrated on many levels across multiple disciplines.

My artist instagram account https://www.instagram.org/wendyihardieartist has many examples of photography projects & work in progress within it’s highlight folders which give a more in depth view into my alternative process photographic practice.