Plinth

Upstairs in Shoreditch, a hooded figure kneels, face towards the window. Except: there is no face; the figure is a wraithlike void, hood lifted over nothing. Mannequin hands emerge at the wraith’s waist, palm up in supplication, and miss-matched, monochrome stilettos poke out from the figure’s jeans. Running down its back is a spine of flattened metal fins, which trails into a long tail, which rests on a wooden stick, which rests on a pile of dirt. And did I mention the careful arrangement of objects just in front of this unsettling being? A seed pod, beans, and some other gnarled items cast in silver? What strange spell is also being cast here?

According to the title of Anne Hardy’s solo exhibition, currently on show across both of Maureen Paley’s galleries, it’s a Survival Spell. This fragmentary, fantastical, faintly steam-punky figure is Being (Interloper) – one of two humanoid sculptures Hardy has created for the show, from scraps of metal, mounds of dirt, and her own clothes. In the second, Being (Immaterial), the mannequin hands seem to protrude from a mess of rusted wires. A body? A scrapheap? An electric storm? White high heels are loosely attached to loose jeans, bent at the knee as if this rusty scrawl of a figure was seated. Here too, the being’s feet rest on dirt, and – look closer – at one hand, in front of two crossed fingers, lies a silver bean and a cluster of gems. Across the room, a severed semi-circle of soil is decked with more charged and banal objects: sticks, flattened foil, stones, silver tubes, a flat lace, and a fruit core cast in pewter that, at second glance, could be a walnut, or the organ of a small animal.

Looking at Hardy’s sculptural arrangements, you feel like the interloper, stumbling across something still ongoing and at work, which you were not meant to see. Hardy’s Survival Spell is made up of a mystifying precarity.

These creatures – interloping and dematerialising, trying to survive and making magic from mounds of dirt – started life amongst inhospitable rubble and dust, in the remote landscape of west Texas during Hardy’s residency at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa. In this sparse desert locale, Hardy gave herself further restrictions, challenging herself to work with as few materials as possible. The resulting works contain tangible traces of her stretch in the desert. In one piece, tucked behind a corner at Maureen Paley’s Three Colts Lane gallery, a light bulb is programmed to respond to meteorological data from Marfa. Set in a round, weather-beaten wooden table, the bare bulb is flanked by stones set in the shape of two skeleton hands, as if a being made of rocks had wasted away, or vanished, leaning into the light at that very spot.

Hardy collected other materials for the exhibition in London and Tokyo – all come from what she calls, ‘the unstable and shifting terrains at the edges of our attention’: neglected or overlooked zones, and ‘pockets of wild space’ in the margins and peripheries. The glistening tail of Being (Interloper) was made from tin cans, crushed by trucks outside her studio, and across all the works a similar magic trick is performed: refuse is made into art through translocation. The errant margins are brought into the gallery; into the centre. The ‘field works’ for which Hardy is probably best known, are here earth works, desert works, scrapheap works, even apocalypse works. For what is survivalism but an elaborate set of survival spells, with doomsday preppers our modern mystics, warning of an oncoming cataclysm and warring against it, all at once?

Across town, at Alice Amati gallery, more strange, sculptural seeds are on display. In Sofía Salazar Rosales’ solo show, assemblages slump and droop like tired bodies – beings that, like Hardy’s, seem figurative, despite being faceless. As in ‘Survival Spell’, these material embodiments are scattered with talismans.

Take ‘When the axial skeleton decides to speak’, for instance. Glass aggregate gives the greenish form an encrusted look, like a salt lick. Hanging from the sculpture is a nylon thread, strung with glass beads and, suspended near the gallery floor, a bull’s eye seed. Or, as the gallery text prompts, ‘ojo de buey’ – a talisman speaking to the Cuban-Ecuadorian artist’s heritage through its subtle reference to the Santería belief system. An Afro-Caribbean religion that developed in Cuba during the late 19th century, Santeria is based in the belief that a supernatural force permeates the universe, which can be manipulated through ritual actions. Mediums contact spirits through a process of divination – using their supernatural powers to prophesy the future.

Hardy refers to her works in Survival Spell as ‘alchemical accumulations,’ and this seems a fitting moniker for Salazar Rosales’ sculptures too, as both artists are similarly engaged with time and memory; transformation, prophesy and ritual. Crucially though, in both these shows, this merging of the material and the mystical is also done for political ends. In Salazar Rosales’ ‘They ask to stay’, for instance, cast plantain bananas hang in a beaded mesh bag. The work is pale, ghostly, and conjures the fraught history of these agricultural products in Ecuador and other parts of Latin America. Again, Salazar Rosales’ hanging forms take on the weight of bodies. Their talismanic power holds political power too, as a comment on the violence of global markets, inequality and consumption. Exploitation is an undercurrent in Hardy’s 'Survival Spell' too. The ravaging of the climate is conjured in her piles of dirt and so too is the brutal logic of marginalisation. Hardy’s ritualistic scraps of desert and refuse tell a tale of survival against the odds, despite the harsh conditions they are forced to bear.

Both shows give me hope. Hardy and Salazar Rosales both go beyond trope or trend. They seem to offer a way to engage with mysticism and precarity not merely as an aesthetic or apolitical trick. Both call forth ghosts and spectral beings as a means of engaging with exploitation, marginalisation and mistreatment. The seeds have not been buried but planted. ‘The spooky thing about dirt if you’re a neoliberal is that dirt is not passive,’ the poet Anne Carson wrote: ‘Dirt is coming to get you’.

By Eloise Hendy