Roger Hardy returns to Snape Maltings with new works on show in the Dovecote Studio, Gallery 21 and Concert Hall Foyer.

An introduction by John-Paul Stonard to WOOD, an exhibition at Britten Pears Arts, Snape, 2025.

Roger Hardy communes with oak and holly in the ancient coppice at Staverton Thicks, pine groves at Rendlesham, and Sweet Chestnuts standing in the woodlands at Henham Park, all forests local to his Suffolk home. Drawings made on smoothed planks are transformed into woodcuts, images conveying the sheer enchantment of Staverton Thicks, where oaks have been shaped by centuries of pollarding, wide, hollowed trunks grown over with mighty holliesbirch and rowan. 
Where Hardy’s energetic woodcuts convey the ecstatic strangeness of ancient woodland, his paintings take a step back, transforming the feeling of being within the forest into a language of drawn, coloured marks, as if forging a language to evoke the magical enclosure of wildwood. 

Fragments of wood are taken up (with permission) and become the spirits that might have inhabited this place, the fluid and jagged forms of grain hanging like the famous “wet-look” drapery on Greek classical sculpture. Some of Hardy’s wooden figurines, half carved, half found, are sealed with gum arabic and ochre pigment, bringing to mind the wooden figurines acting out scenes of daily life made in ancient Egypt. Hardy’s figurines are the descendants of these, as much as the smooth-faced figures of archaic Cycladic art, and the animated terracotta dancers of T’ang dynasty China. Few ancient figures of wood survive, only those preserved in desiccated desert sands or anaerobic bogland. With their spare, fluid forms, Hardy’s figures stand in for this ancient loss.

Ancient survivors also appear in the shape of turned wooden vessels, made from wood scavenged from the forest floor, worked on a lathe, their polished surfaces riddled with burr markings and blackened by lightning and fire. We might imagine them in some sun-dappled grove or clearing, on a makeshift shrine, a return offering to the spirits of the ancient woodland from which Hardy extracts a growing world of images.