Tom Hardwick-Allan

NADA New York

18 - 21 May 2023

For NADA New York, South Parade is pleased to present Catching the First Mute Sliced in the Morning, a solo presentation by Tom Hardwick-Allan (b.1996 in Derbyshire, UK).

Hardwick-Allan’s sculptural reliefs are carved from plywood to resemble cross sections of tree, with the exposed layers implying the accumulation of time through the concentric rings - like dead wood dreaming of its own preprocessed form. From this fever state they trace metonymic links between falconry, augury, digestion and early learning. Hardwick-Allan scratches away at the surface with chisels, pens, ink, routers and an angle grinder. He treats image making as a metabolic process in which the shapes of ideas are broken down to activate the latent chemical potential that they contain.

Each of the three circular reliefs, or ‘slices’ as Hardwick-Allan refers to them, depicts the remains of half eaten birds found by the artist near his studio in London. Coincidentally, to ‘slice’ is also a verb in falconry terminology meaning the egestion of fecal matter (known as a ‘mute’). In printmaking terms, these reliefs could be seen as ‘blocks’ - a term also used in falconry to describe a tree stump used as a feeding platform. The titles are carved into the work, however in reverse, suggesting the surface is either a reflection or a woodcut waiting to be printed from. The ‘slices’ also act as portals into three realms of existence - above, across and below. This forms the basis of a quasi-cosmology, elaborated upon in the accompanying artist’s publication. 

The half ‘wing’ speaks of its own becoming, like something on the edge of articulating consciousness. As with the ‘slices’, it is carved from birch plywood, the bark of which was used at the beginning of history as a pre-paper writing surface. But here the felt-tip filled engravings more closely resemble the decorated underside of a school desk.

The broken grid of rubber bands - also a product of tree, is based on a falconry feeding chart but abstracted beyond recognition, implying a substructural mesh. Mounted atop is a wood engraving print, carved from an actual cross section, which depicts a tree struck by lightning and splitting into slices - its own kind of origin myth. 

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Tom Hardwick-Allan (b. 1996 in Derbyshire, UK) lives and works in London and graduated from The Slade School of Fine Art (2019). Recent solo and duo exhibitions include Halbe Sachen, with Stanislava Kovalcikova, Galerie Koshbakht, (Cologne 2023), Scrying the Slice, South Parade (London, 2022), Elif Saydam / Tom Hardwick-Allan, Lady Helen (Berlin, 2022) and Going Light, Zarinbal Khoshbakht (Cologne, 2021). Selected group exhibitions include Babel, Spazio MUSA, (Turin, 2023), Pygostyle, The Residence Gallery (London, 2022), Meltdown, Ridley Road Project Space (London, 2022), Pathways on Paper, South Parade (London, 2022), Von der schenkenden Tugend, Zarinbal Khoshbakht (Cologne, 2021), &zines, Weinspach, Zarinbal Khoshbahkt (Cologne, 2021), “Hope” is the thing with feathers, South Parade (London, 2021), Casting the Runes, 108 Fleet Street (London, 2021), Winter Wonderland, Fan Fiction International (Hyde Park, 2021), The Correspondence, Residence Gallery (London, 2020), Flow my Tears, Acud Galerie (Berlin, 2020), In the tame beasts eyes, Zarinbal Khoshbakht (Cologne, 2020) and Breathless: London Art Now, Ca’ Pesaro (Venice, 2019) - curated by Norman Rosenthal & Harry Woodlock.