Artist Anne Hardy on the work of Collection artist Hubert Dalwood, whose work features in Towner Art Gallery’s latest National Partners exhibition, The Weather Garden: Anne Hardy curates the Arts Council Collection.
Hubert Dalwood (1924-1976) often played with scale, making larger and smaller versions of the same work in order to view them differently. He imagined his sculptures as though they were ritualistic objects or artefacts from a forgotten civilization, leaving fingerprints or traces of his touch on clay models before casting them in metal. Arbor (1973) is an aluminium cast of a maquette that was created for a larger work, the modest scale of this sculpture sits like a stage, a miniature architectural space to project ourselves into.
In the context of The Weather Garden, Arbor becomes an indicator of the stage that we stand on in the exhibition– the floor of the gallery is reimagined as a breeze block plinth on which works and visitors come together. The shifting sense of scale contained within Arbor (as maquette or full size work) are also interesting in relation to Japanese Zen gardens, which were an influence on my approach to the exhibition–the garden as metaphor or stand-in for a larger world beyond, one that we may not be able to enter but only look at and meditate upon.
About The Weather Garden
Anne Hardy’s work derives from places she calls ‘pockets of wild space’ – gaps in the urban space where materials, atmospheres, and emotions gather – using what she finds there to manifest sensory and unstable installation works that fully immerse you. Hardy brings this approach to her selection for The Weather Garden, envisioning the gallery space as a shifting impermanent landscape, a meditative environment shaped by local weather data, which has been translated into gently fluctuating light.
The Weather Garden is at Towner Art Gallery until 2 June 2019.