Anne Hardy’s photographs speak of obsession, isolation and deception. The images are of rooms inhabited by things rather than humans, a feeling of abandonment prevails. Sometimes this is a momentary absence as if the occupants have just left, more often it seems that the rooms have been left to themselves for along time. The things (butterflies, trees, cobwebs, light bulbs) take over, breed, maybe even consume the original human residents (I notice that in one of the images the door is bolted from the inside).

Each scene is excessively over filled – in Lumber the space is stuffed with discarded Christmas trees, in Cell a den or hibernation space is insulated from the outside world with mattresses, quilts, blankets and a myriad of hoarded junk, in Untitled IV (Balloons) streamer stalactites hang from the ceiling while planks rise up from the floor to meet them. It is as if the contents of the scene is pushing up against the surface of the photograph.

These obsessive tendencies are mirrored in the artist’s methods which become performative, each scene is assigned an extensive back story by the artist, however it is never made explicit, there is always room for the viewer to add their own narrative. The rooms are then meticulously constructed in the artist’s studio using found objects and materials, photographed and then dismantled and destroyed. The finished work exists only as a photograph, transformed from three dimensional sculpture into two dimensional surface – a process which is emphasised by the use of diasec mounting giving an incredibly thin floating picture plain.

Hardy complicates the idea of the surface or façade by deliberately leaving behind traces of the construction process. Most of the sets seem to have been stuck together with expanding foam which drips out of wall and ceiling joints like excess glue, however I wonder if its presence is more about the fact that it looks like glue than its actual sticking properties and so in apparently revealing her methods the artist is in fact adding another layer of deception.

My favourite piece in this exhibition is Small Space, here the perspective changes and we find ourselves looking up into an Artex universe with a smattering of stuck on stars and at its centre a silver ceiling fan playing the part of a 2001 space station. Here as in many of her photographs Hardy shows us the charm and exoticism of everyday objects when isolated or multiplied and what fun can be had in creating a stuck together world for us explore.