OPEN ECO: Wendy I. Hardie, UNIVERSAL THRESHOLD (UNDER B E T W E E N after before), (2024-25)

This photograph was captured on a beach in east Scotland near the birthplace of John Muir, father of environmental conservation and America’s National Parks. On the wooded, rocky coast stand eroded remnants of WW2 coastal defenses, giant, hand-cast, anti-tank, concrete blocks forming chains of resistance against fascist invasion by sea. The haunting, sculptural forms are profoundly elegiac metaphors. They hold fragile collective resistance against human, and now human and environmental degradation, articulating the need to comprehend the porosity of all life. The artist created the original analogue print with a WW2 era camera and homemade, site specific botanical photographic developers.

Wendy Hardie is a multi awarded environmental artist and emerging expanded photographer and curator based in London and Scotland.  Hardie’s photography employs alternative analogue processes embedded in or created with performative, sculptural & installation based forms, working with sustainable methods, materials and plant based recipes. With a passion for the land forged through an intensely immersive childhood on a Scottish farm, then a degree and diploma in architecture, her phenomenological practice focuses on poetic spatial, human narratives and humanity’s relationship to our critically fragile Anthropocene environment.  Exhibiting nationally, Hardie was shortlisted for this year’s Royal Photographic Society’s International Photography Exhibition.

United Kingdom
wendyhardieartist.com
@wendyihardieartist