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?
![Seeds + Spells](http://plinth.uk.com/cdn/shop/articles/Maureen_Paley_Anne_Hardy_Survival_Spell_2024_Photo_Angus_Mill_1-300_320x149_crop_center.jpg?v=1715880107)
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Seeds + Spells
Seeds and spells have become commonplace in the contemporary art landscape. Much has been made of the recent ‘mystical turn’ – witches, ghosts and unsettled spirits have been haunting the cultural imaginary since 2016, at least. At the same time, the art world has been nurturing a keen interest in material and process-oriented works. Clay is everywhere. Textiles are hot too – woven into grander narratives about high art and craft, and the desire for tactility in a digital era. Now these two trends are combining in a wave of exhibitions giving matter a spiritual dimension; making the inert stuff of the earth dynamic, vital. Essentially, this is art work as alchemy.
"A body? A scrapheap? An electric storm?"
![Maureen paley anne hardy survival spell 2024 photo angus mill 3 300](https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/plinth.uk.com/images/files/000/004/134/1024x1024/Maureen_Paley_Anne_Hardy_Survival_Spell_2024_Photo_Angus_Mill_3-300.jpg?1715880166)
Being (Interloper), 2022–24
artist’s clothes, tin cans crushed by trucks outside the studio, welded
steel, cast pewter, cast jesmonite, jewellery, earth, wood, wire
115 × 55 × 360 cm
© Anne Hardy, courtesy Maureen Paley, London
Photo: Angus Mill
![Maureen paley anne hardy survival spell 2024 photo angus mill 5 300](https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/plinth.uk.com/images/files/000/004/127/1024x1024/Maureen_Paley_Anne_Hardy_Survival_Spell_2024_Photo_Angus_Mill_5-300.jpg?1715880012)
Anne Hardy
Being (Immaterial), 2023 – 2024
artists clothes, rusted wire, shells, welded steel, jesmonite, jewellery, cast concrete, bronze, pewter, white metal, dried plant, earth
82 × 116 × 130 cm
© Anne Hardy, courtesy Maureen Paley, London
Photo: Angus Mill
"Looking at Hardy’s sculptural arrangements, you feel like the interloper"
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.
![Maureen paley anne hardy survival spell 2024 photo angus mill 8 300](https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/plinth.uk.com/images/files/000/004/128/1024x1024/Maureen_Paley_Anne_Hardy_Survival_Spell_2024_Photo_Angus_Mill_8-300.jpg?1715880013)
Anne Hardy
Survival Spell, 2022–2024
found materials, earth, cast pewter, Chinati rocks
85 × 115 × 75 cm
© Anne Hardy, courtesy Maureen Paley, London
Photo: Angus Mill
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.
![Maureen paley anne hardy survival spell 2024 photo angus mill 12 300](https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/plinth.uk.com/images/files/000/004/129/1024x1024/Maureen_Paley_Anne_Hardy_Survival_Spell_2024_Photo_Angus_Mill_12-300.jpg?1715880013)
Anne Hardy
Energy Locator, detail, 2023–24
found materials, stones, welded steel, light, custom-designed computer system for light source that responds to Marfa meteorological data
99 × 81 cm
© Anne Hardy, courtesy Maureen Paley, London
Photo: Angus Mill
"In Sofía Salazar Rosales’ solo show, assemblages slump and droop like tired bodies"
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?
![Installation view alice amati sofi%cc%81a salazar rosales 01 tom carter](https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/plinth.uk.com/images/files/000/004/130/1024x1024/Installation_view_-_Alice_Amati_-_Sofi%CC%81a_Salazar_Rosales_-_01_Tom_Carter.jpg?1715880014)
Installation view of Sofía Salazar Rosales: Yo no sé si tenga amor la eternidad, Pero allá, tal como aquí, En la boca llevarás, Sabor a mí, at Alice Amati, London,
2024. Courtesy of Alice Amati. Ph. Tom Carter
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.
![Installation view alice amati sofi%cc%81a salazar rosales 04 tom carter](https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/plinth.uk.com/images/files/000/004/131/1024x1024/Installation_view_-_Alice_Amati_-_Sofi%CC%81a_Salazar_Rosales_-_04_Tom_Carter.jpg?1715880018)
Installation view of Sofía Salazar Rosales: Yo no sé si tenga amor la eternidad, Pero allá, tal como aquí, En la boca llevarás, Sabor a mí, at Alice Amati, London,
"Glass aggregate gives the greenish form an encrusted look, like a salt lick"
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.
![Installation view alice amati sofi%cc%81a salazar rosales 05 tom carter](https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/plinth.uk.com/images/files/000/004/132/1024x1024/Installation_view_-_Alice_Amati_-_Sofi%CC%81a_Salazar_Rosales_-_05_Tom_Carter.jpg?1715880042)
Installation view of Sofía Salazar Rosales: Yo no sé si tenga amor la eternidad, Pero allá, tal como aquí, En la boca llevarás, Sabor a mí, at Alice Amati, London,
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.
"ritualistic scraps of desert and refuse tell a tale of survival against the odds"
![Installation view alice amati sofi%cc%81a salazar rosales 06 tom carter](https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/plinth.uk.com/images/files/000/004/133/1024x1024/Installation_view_-_Alice_Amati_-_Sofi%CC%81a_Salazar_Rosales_-_06_Tom_Carter.jpg?1715880052)
Installation view of Sofía Salazar Rosales: Yo no sé si tenga amor la eternidad, Pero allá, tal como aquí, En la boca llevarás, Sabor a mí, at Alice Amati, London,
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