Penny Hardy

Penny studied for a foundation degree at Chelsea School of Art, followed by an honours degree from Middlesex Polytechnic in Scientific Illustration. She has worked as a freelance illustrator for the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, and as a graphic designer before turning to sculpting full-time.

Hardy’s objective is to imbue a sculpture with life and vitality whilst remaining true to the use of simple, raw materials. She explores the use of layer, shadow and light reflection with hard or textured edges to create a sense of fluidity.

Her dance figures express organic forms as tensile elements and are inspired by the dynamic forms of contemporary dancers. By using flexible, sinuous materials to create the original model the dancer’s raw and exposed movement is conveyed, and by leaving out a lot of mass within the sculpture and exposing wires outside of the main form, a vision of movement is created – where the limb may have been or the extremes of a dancer’s movement contained within that pose.