Exhibitions
Rogers sculptures continue to express a resonating pulse, a contemplation of the full cycle of life - a commentary on what it means to be human in a world dissembling around us.
Paul Vater, Contemporary & Country.
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.
Roger Hardy. 2025.
Wood.
Britten Pears Arts. Snape Maltings, Suffolk.
Saturday 13 September – Sunday 19 October.
An exhibition of recent Sculptures, Woodcuts, paintings and Turned forms.
Beaux Arts Bath.
New sculptures.
12th May -7th June 2025.
JaggedArt 2024
Threaded by colour.
New group exhibition at JaggedArt, London.
FLOWERS GALLERY.
Small is Beautiful exhibition.
30th November - 6th January 2023. Cork Street gallery
Heads & Tails
A group exhibition with Contemporary and Country.
09 Sept. - 28th Oct. 2023
The Fermoy Gallery & Shakespeare Barn, Kings Lynn.
John Kiki, Colin Self, Rachael Long and others.
JaggedArt
ARTEFACT Fair London
9th - 13 May 2023
JaggedArt will be presenting some of my recent work at Artefact ‘23 at the Design Centre, Chelsea Harbour.
Wood’n Boats at The Yare Gallery
Friday 9th September - Thursday 6th October 2022
This exhibition features the new work of two east Anglian artists - paintings by James Dodds and sculptures by Roger Hardy.
Harry Young (BPA), Roger Hardy, Devi Singh (curator)
TURNING TIDE
Dovecote studio. In association with Britten Pears Arts, Snape Maltings. The month of August 2021
INTRODUCTION.
The element that separates good art from the mere decorative is that intangible, transformative quality. It’s hard to put you finger on exactly what this is but I do know that it emerges from seeing, or should I say experiencing, a great exhibition a richer person than before you entered and much of this transformation is that you now look at the world around you through a different prism.
Roger’s work has this effect on me. His haunting figures, mere suggestions of human forms, are timeless. They evoke the biblical era and yet have the modernity of a Henry Moore. Drift wood caught on the oceans currents, smoothed by decades of natures sanding transforming into a scene of a present day migrant floating optimistically towards a better life with nothing to his name but the shirt on his back.
Vanessa Branson 2021. Writer and founder of the Marrakech Biennale
EXHIBITION.
Hosted by Internationally-renowned and prestigious Snape Maltings Concert Hall, this exhibition takes place in the unique Dovecote Studio and is a collaboration between Britten Pears Arts and Devi Singh
Turning Tide is a reflective body of sculptural works that symbolise the artist’s journey and connection to place and environment, and is his first solo exhibition at this major International institution.
Emanating from nature, Hardy’s gnarled, ethereal figures, exquisitely carved from sea-worn-wood, not only alert us to this decaying, wastefully discarded material but also hold an echo of our own human fragility. This feeling of belonging, identity and place became very relevant to the artist during the last year of lockdowns.
Hardy sees his work as “Reflecting the movement of cultures across the seas, whether though active migration or displacement. The wood washed up on our shores is a metaphor for this. Many woods not being native to our shores have been on quite a journey to arrive. Each with a story to tell.”
Curated by Devi Singh.
TUNE IN to an interview with me on BBC Radio Suffolk. Lesley Dolphin on the sofa chat about my work and life. Iplayer sounds app. 1.29 mins into the show. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p09q1d71
