I have sustained myself as a full-time artist since leaving art school in the 1990s. I’ve survived through a combination of irregular sales, public commissions, and exhibition fees. However, since the pandemic and the resulting reset of the art-market, sales of my work have virtually disappeared, and competition for public funding has intensified significantly.
Compounding this, over the past year I have become the primary carer for my wife, also an artist, who is living with stage 4 cancer. This situation is now slowly stabilising.
The possibility of this award comes at a critically important moment. It would provide the support and confidence required to continue pursuing ambitious, challenging work—art that is rooted in materiality, collaboration, and the physical world at a time when so much is shifting into the digital.
I’ve tried to continue making uncompromising, ambitions and challenging work, experimenting at the studio, maintaining the integrity of my enquiries. I have spent my lifetime making and trying to understand the sculptural object. My sense of the existential threat posed by the loss of the haptic as our world becomes increasingly digital means I want to make more work that purposefully directs audience to the value of making. I would like to continue to work with people in ways that reconnect them to what it means to build creatively together as a way to encourage resilience in the face of environmental challenges and the storm that’s coming.
For The Dover Prize I would make new works that are powered by solar energy, animism or human interaction, sculptural ecosystems that are both symbolic and functional. I’d bring together a local community interested in making these with me.
I would source and purchase recycled solar PV panels and other energy symbols of energy creation, I would combine these with images taken of standing stones from local neolithic sites. Together with local volunteers we would build our own alternative power generator.
I’m committed to a practice that brings together art, science-fiction, sustainability, protest and community—to build a new, resonant creative language for the uncertain future ahead. The Dover Prize as a perfect opportunity to explore these issues.
I am a well-respected artist of many years standing. I have a reputation and following that would bring attention to the prize. The works that I am proposing would generate both local and national interest. These new artworks would be rooted in the local area, made with people from the local community and they would address issues important to that community – questions about the climate emergency and energy production combined with an ancient connection to the Darlington area.
Recent projects have included embedding myself in a locality and engaging in deep research. I have found this very rewarding and I see this opportunity as a chance to engage with a new area of the country and a new community.
I have confidence that we would be able to find a venue to exhibit the works made during the period of the prize, and that the works would continue to have a life beyond this moment.
For three decades, my work has sought to challenge how we think about iconic architecture and wild nature—two opposing symbols of permanence—by exposing their fragility and entanglement in utopian dreams. I’ve taken sculpture out of the gallery into the wider world, where ideas of access, control, collapse, and collective identity are tested at scale My practice is wide-ranging and restless, comprising sculpture, photography, film-making, climbing, publications, 1:1 scale architectural installations, participatory site-specific works. Nature’s power and the fight for balance in our world have long been a focus, most recently, working with solar technologies—PV and thermal systems—not to power infrastructure, but to activate sculptures inspired by ancient standing stones. These works form energy feedback-loops: lights power solar panels, which heat the sculptures, triggering fans to cool them down again. It’s a speculative re-imagining of sculpture as a living, responsive system—one that reveals the hidden animism in the objects around us. Works for a post-nature future. The works I’ve made often imagine time running ahead, generating a sense of narrative, of the viewer having arrived at a situation of ambiguous cause and uncertain outcome. Entropy and decay are ever present, frequently focusing on the exact moment the man-made is reclaimed by the vibrancy of nature. Alongside my gallery practice, I have developed a series of challenging participatory artworks in the public realm. The ongoing work Nowhereisland evolved over a 15-year period and resulted in a new nation being formed from a previously undiscovered Arctic island. Durational, socially-engaged works such as Dropper, Vigil, and The Clearing built literal sanctuaries—temporary, precarious, communal spaces activated and inhabited by volunteers: held in tension between idealism and collapse.
My practice has been a sustained investigation into architecture, secular habitation, communal living and the construction of sanctuary as an inherent drive to form refuge from the world. How do we build shelter—physically, socially, emotionally—when the ground is shifting beneath us? My work is an ongoing act of reclamation, of piecing together meaning from ruins, of asking what kind of sanctuary we can still create in a broken world.
Do you have a degree in visual or applied arts at undergraduate and/or post-graduate level? Please provide details. (200 words)
BA Fine Art Camberwell School Of Art
MA Fine Art Royal College of Art
BA Fine Art Camberwell School Of Art
MA Fine Art Royal College of Art
Winner RAMM commission
Winner Compton Verney ‘Eyecatcher’
Winner COAL Prix
Winner Arts Foundation Award
Winner ACE Artist Take the Lead
Winner Linklakers Barbican Commission
Winner Sculpture at Goodwood
ACE funding x 3
Much of my practice involves working with volunteers, building participatory artworks where the making is the work. I’ve made durational works where myself and volunteers have lived for up to a year, and created a new nation (from an island I discovered in the High Arctic)which accrued over 23,000 citizens who signed up and contributed to the ever evolving constitution.
When I lived in London I set up and ran artist studios.
RAMM Exeter,
Folkestone Triennial
Yokohama Triennial
Fruitmarket Edinburgh,
Barbican Gallery London
Louisiana Museum Denmark
British Embassy Moscow
Arts Council Collection
Government Art Collection
Contemporary Arts Collection
Arts Fund
Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne
Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Austria
British Embassy Moscow
Frieze
Artforum
Art Review
Art Monthly
Guardian
Observer
Sunday Times
Financial Times
Wallpaper*
Architecture Today
Art Quarterly
Dezeen
Blueprint
Modern Painters
Vogue
I-D
The Art Newspaper
etc
Victoria Miro Gallery London
Victoria Miro Gallery Venice
National Trust for Scotland – St Kilda
Victoria Miro Venice
Banff Fleck Fellowship – Canada
Rijksakadamie Amsterdam
Email: alex@alexhartley.net
Address: THE MILL, Luppitt, Luppitt, LUPPITT, Devon, EX14 4UB, GB
Local Authority: Devon County Council
