Tom Hardwick-Allan

Lives and works in London, UK

Artist statement

Tom Hardwick-Allan carves away at various surfaces, employing a principle of negation to trace links between printmaking, falconry and augury. Hardwick-Allan has produced a series of cast iron low reliefs, through which he focuses on the notion of Imprinting, the initial association made by a newly born by which a social image is projected and shaped. By pressing carved wood into a mixture of sand and petrol to leave an imprint into which iron is poured from a furnace, the regulation of which echoes the extra-uterine maintenance of a premature chick with the balance of fuel, fluid and oxygen. The use of iron is particular for its historic connotations but also for its symbolism of obsolescence — it cannot sustain the accelerations in agriculture and industry that is brought about.

Artwork