The works in Tom Hardwick-Allan’s present exhibition at South Parade are actual reflections of its title, ‘Low Aid and Foil’: a foil is each the path {that a} hunted animal leaves because it passes by means of its surroundings and a plot system by which a personality is outlined by its inverse. The present contains a number of new cast-iron reliefs, made by urgent carved wooden into petrol-rich sand – a technique known as imprinting – earlier than pouring melted-down automobile brake discs into this mould. In the course of the interval by which the artist made these works, his father and grandmother had been injured once they had been hit by a automobile that did not brake. This intersection of household, coincidence and materiality reappear all through the exhibition, lending a way of haunting to the works on show.
Upon coming into the gallery, guests encounter a thoughts map of the artist’s artistic course of, composed of free-form associative phrases, symbols and numbers that act as a information to the nonlinear relations between these works. Because the map factors out, folded amongst Hardwick-Allan’s works is a fancy internet of symbols and identifications, histories and time. In psychology, imprinting is a phase-sensitive studying course of ascribed to our early years, which has a psychoanalytic bearing on the connection between caregiver and little one. In ‘Low Aid and Foil’, imprinting is offered by means of the bodily mark-making and casting used to generate the works on show, and in addition by means of the re-emergence of household and animal relations from the artist’s previous. The darkish, densely labored iron sculpture Fetus < Falcon (all works 2025) depicts a number of hooded falcons, whose types create in adverse the outlines of 5 foetuses. Hardwick-Allan’s relationship with birds traverses the current: because the artist tells me, he recollects a flightless crow which entered his household residence on his twentieth birthday, the final day of his adolescence, and refused to go away for a number of years.
On first encounter, these sculptures cling closely, the results of intricate and extremely aestheticized sculpting. Some works have a diagrammatic look, comparable to X and Y, every of which contains a collection of iron spheres organized to type the shapes of chromosomes. However beneath all these sculptures, a fancy referential system is at work. For example, the ‘lower than’ image (<) seems all through the exhibition, partly suggesting a technique of discount, but additionally bringing to thoughts the form of a hen’s beak, like these of the falcons in Fetus < Falcon. The density of the iron sculptures is rigorously offset by the set up Secrets and techniques of the Fruitfly, a collection of wrapped books stacked upon the windowsills and flooring across the edges of the gallery. Taken from Hardwick-Allan’s bed room, every quantity is hid in glassine paper, which has been handled with oil and graphite, and positioned on prime of sheets of foil made by piecing collectively crisp, candy and cigarette packets.
In non secular iconography, lambs signify innocence, purity and sacrifice. In Lamb < Metropolis, industrialization is the prism by means of which we perceive fragility and dependence. To maintain a untimely lamb alive requires human interference: the animal is reliant for its survival on an extra-uterine system. The creature depicted on the backside of Lamb < Metropolis seems to be dreaming, in utero, of an industrial metropolis: a number of futuristic skyscrapers float above the foetal lamb. Hardwick-Allan’s work typically illustrates the tensions between vulnerability and industrialisation. Right here, the untimely lamb is positioned towards the accelerations of modernity, the harshness of those circumstances bolstered by the fragility of its physique.
These delicate connections – transgressing epochs and figures – reiterate the associative imprinting underpinning the exhibition. Upon leaving, I notice that, throughout the intricacies of Hardwick-Allan’s work, one thing of the previous is being undone, nimbly recast and laid to relaxation.
Tom Hardwick-Allan’s ‘Low Aid and Foil’ is on view at South Parade, London, till April 19
Primary picture: Tom Hardwick-Allan, Lamb < Metropolis (element), 2025, forged iron and graphite, 178 × 173 × 4 cm. Courtesy: the artist and South Parade, London; {photograph}: Corey Bartle-Sanderson
