#CASatHome, with Alice Channer, Anne Hardy and Carey Young

In a change of format today, I talked to three London-based artists about their work and about the nature of the studio under the current, crisis conditions. This conversation arose from an initial invitation for a studio visit with Anne Hardy. She suggested that we could instead be part of an ongoing conversation she is having with some of her peers about the broader conditions around working issues for artists, at practical and creative levels. Anne, Alice Channer and Carey Young used images of what they think of as their studios as Zoom backgrounds, often showing places that they cannot access at the moment. This is their view of what a studio is today and what it is like to work in this unprecedented situation.

Anne Hardy creates immersive installations that derive from places she calls ‘pockets of wild space’ – gaps in the urban space where materials, atmospheres, and emotions gather. her most recent work The Depth of Darkness, the Return of the Light was commissioned by Tate Britain for their annual Winter Commission 2019/20.

Alice Channer works with sculpture to stretch out, slow down and speed up industrial and post-industrial production processes to make them visible to herself and to others. Her forthcoming exhibitions include High Desert Test Sites 2020 in California and the Liverpool Biennial.

Carey Young’s works with video, photography, performance, text and installation to explore relationships between the body, language, performance and systems of power such as law, politics or business. Her forthcoming exhibitions include the Busan Biennial, South Korea.

When the museums and galleries close their doors; when the art fairs and biennales are postponed, and the whole ecology grinds to a halt - the hardships are felt everywhere. A-N, the artists information agency, this week published an impact study illustrating just how deep and fast the crisis has hit artists.

The conversations with Anne, Alice and Carey – as well as with other artists in the last few weeks – have been critical in how we understand this unfolding situation. We felt it was important to bring these voices to a broader public.

Caroline Douglas
Director