Tom Hardwick-Allan: Scrying the Slice

South Parade, 14 October - 19 November 2022

Art rarely represents things in their entirety. In order to show us something new, it has to be selective, pick a viewpoint, examine a detail, or in some other way limit its scope. Imagine an unlimited work of art, so full of ideas that nothing is excluded from it. It would take far too long even to begin to understand it, it would be far too big to get a hold of. Audiences would turn back to the world they're already in.

You suspect that Tom Hardwick-Allan chafes a little at this restriction. Nonetheless, in Scrying the Slice, the artist responds by subjecting an abundance of ideas to the discipline of dissection. Nine pieces of plywood board shaped like cross-sectional slices of tree trunks are installed on the walls and floor of South Parade, as if removed from a living tree and laid out for our scrutiny. The gesture is scientific, investigative - and deadly. Even so, it doesn't tidy things up as much as you might expect.

For a start, the objects are unclassifiable. In one sense, they are plywood sculptures that represent timber, with relief carvings on their surfaces. At the same time, they are drawings, a compendium of marks and images in biro and felt tip: curved forms, wobbly grids, ribbons and bells, shells, lemons, cucumbers, feathers, falcons' claws and pigeons' wings amongst bark, sapwood and pith. The many incisions across the modelled surfaces also recall the blocks that printmakers use to make woodcuts. The artworks hint at the likelihood of being printed, with digits carved, in reverse, into their surfaces. Prints made from the blocks would be clearly numbered from one to nine.

The sheer density of visual information risks excessiveness. The work avoids this trap by metaphorically aligning the process of decay that dead wood undergoes with the profuse interventions of the artist. The accumulations of images on the surfaces are the continuation of the life cycle of the felled tree or trees. Once-organic life perpetuates itself through art, under the stewardship of the artist, questioning the distinction between art and nature. Whether or not some of these forms were already in the trees before they were cut down - I'm thinking especially of the cucumber slices and the footprints in the one called ୧ - is left unanswered, but perhaps it's worth remembering that for Michelangelo, the angel was already in the stone.

The work's greatest strength is its generosity to the audience. Cross-sections imply a whole that requires imaginative participation to complete. Trees spring up in our minds. We can mentally reel off our own editions from the printmakers' blocks. On one of the gallery walls is another product derived from a tree: dozens of red rubber bands, snipped and arranged in a grid, which might recall an episode a few years ago when Keep Britain Tidy fell out with the Royal Mail over allegations that postal workers were littering the red bands over the streets. Again, the artist applies discipline to an unruly organic material, hinting at a much bigger process than what's shown. Instead of excess, Scrying the Slice gives us artful restraint.