Tom Hardwick-Allan Lays the Past to Rest

The works in Tom Hardwick-Allan’s current exhibition at South Parade are exact reflections of its title, ‘Low Relief and Foil’: a foil is both the trail that a hunted animal leaves as it passes through its environment and a plot device by which a character is defined by its inverse. The show comprises several new cast-iron reliefs, made by pressing carved wood into petrol-rich sand – a method called imprinting – before pouring melted-down car brake discs into this mould. During the period in which the artist made these works, his father and grandmother were injured when they were hit by a car that failed to brake. This intersection of family, coincidence and materiality reappear throughout the exhibition, lending a sense of haunting to the works on display.

Upon entering the gallery, visitors encounter a mind map of the artist’s creative process, composed of free-form associative words, symbols and numbers that act as a guide to the nonlinear relations between these works. As the map points out, folded amongst Hardwick-Allan’s works is a complex web of symbols and identifications, histories and time. In psychology, imprinting is a phase-sensitive learning process ascribed to our early years, which has a psychoanalytic bearing on the relationship between caregiver and child. In ‘Low Relief and Foil’, imprinting is presented through the physical mark-making and casting used to generate the works on display, and also through the re-emergence of family and animal relations from the artist’s past. The dark, densely worked iron sculpture Fetus < Falcon (all works 2025) depicts several hooded falcons, whose forms create in negative the outlines of five foetuses. Hardwick-Allan’s relationship with birds traverses the present: as the artist tells me, he recalls a flightless crow which entered his family home on his 20th birthday, the last day of his adolescence, and refused to leave for several years. 

On first encounter, these sculptures hang heavily, the result of intricate and highly aestheticized sculpting. Some works have a diagrammatic appearance, such as X and Y, each of which comprises a series of iron spheres arranged to form the shapes of chromosomes. But beneath all these sculptures, a complex referential system is at work. For instance, the ‘less than’ symbol (<) appears throughout the exhibition, partly suggesting a process of reduction, but also bringing to mind the shape of a bird’s beak, like those of the falcons in Fetus < Falcon. The density of the iron sculptures is carefully offset by the installation Secrets of the Fruitfly, a series of wrapped books stacked upon the windowsills and floors around the edges of the gallery. Taken from Hardwick-Allan’s bedroom, each volume is concealed in glassine paper, which has been treated with oil and graphite, and placed on top of sheets of foil made by piecing together crisp, sweet and cigarette packets.

In religious iconography, lambs signify innocence, purity and sacrifice. In Lamb < City, industrialization is the prism through which we understand fragility and dependence. To keep a premature lamb alive requires human interference: the animal is reliant for its survival on an extra-uterine system. The creature depicted at the bottom of Lamb < City appears to be dreaming, in utero, of an industrial metropolis: several futuristic skyscrapers float above the foetal lamb. Hardwick-Allan’s work often illustrates the tensions between vulnerability and industrialisation. Here, the premature lamb is positioned against the accelerations of modernity, the harshness of these conditions reinforced by the fragility of its body.  

These subtle connections – transgressing epochs and figures – reiterate the associative imprinting underpinning the exhibition. Upon leaving, I realize that, within the intricacies of Hardwick-Allan’s work, something of the past is being undone, nimbly recast and laid to rest. 

Tom Hardwick-Allan’s ‘Low Relief and Foil’ is on view at South Parade, London, until April 19

^{Main image: Tom Hardwick-Allan, Lamb < City (detail), 2025, cast iron and graphite, 178 × 173 × 4 cm. Courtesy: the artist and South Parade, London; photograph: Corey Bartle-Sanderson}