Over the past years, Hannah Perry has developed a practice that arrives in our body before it reaches our mind. The primary language of her work is drawn from the most involuntary registers of human experience: breath, rhythm, flow, contraction. It lives in the frequencies of hyperventilation, trembling pulses, throbs and quivers. Yet the materials through which this language is articulated are resolutely industrial: steel, aluminum, concrete. They are surfaces that carry the memory of manufacture. Through her work, the industrial and the visceral intertwine until their tension dissolves into a disturbing harmony. By drawing these parallels, she brings metal back to the registers of bodies, exposing their circuit of veins filled with iron-rich blood.
Perry’s work has lived inside this language spanning sculpture, video, installation, and sound. Spending time with her work is to become increasingly aware of how thoroughly the structures we build to contain and organise life end up shaping the very texture of feeling. For her first exhibition in Belgium, Hard Love, she presents a constellation of works that sprawls across three floors. In the anatomy of the building, corroded rebars erupt from the entrails of concrete pillars whose surface trembles between the polished and the friable. In Rogue Aggregate, vulnerability becomes structural. Chaos takes over. Lines fuse with the accuracy of a three-dimensional drawing (a practice Perry is currently rekindling) and suspend the logic of material weight. The poles curve and bow as though gravity has been renegotiated, each rod bent with the lightness of a breath.
The work breathes out. Melted red resin hearts sit nestled within the structure. Residues of an exhalation already gone, the body’s air pushed into solid form and left there to harden. They carry something of a deflated balloon. But perhaps also a rawness that’s almost perverse. Too soft for the steel they are lodged in. The heart is a symbol so well-worn it has been largely evacuated of meaning, but Perry insists on its weight and its capacity to carry feeling. She returns to the debased image and finds it still beating.
Perry’s work has long articulated the experience of being a working artist and a mother. What it gives form to is the confluence of contradicting feelings held at once. The ambivalence of not being enough and being too much. The rebars echo the chaos of an overstimulated nervous system, the heart caught within it. Floating.
Weightless and yet heavy with the specific gravity of a long day. A perpetual and exhausting labour of love.
Above this towers Antagonist (2024), first shown at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead as part of Perry’s exhibition Manual Labour. A colossal steel pelvis. At the Baltic, the structure moved. Fitted with stepper motors, it mechanically choreographed the act of childbirth. Gyrating. Bearing down. Here it is stilled. Its mechanics remain implied, the capacity for motion held in suspension. Something of the effort seems caught in the metal itself, a residue of past exertion held in the joints. In fact, the pelvis is the body’s deepest structural site. To enlarge it to monumental scale is to insist on its architectural function, to position it as a piece of infrastructure rather than an anatomy.
Perry has spoken about matrescence as shattering. The self temporarily eradicated in the process of becoming a mother, a division that persists long after physical recovery. In Hard Love that body is rebuilt from the ground up. The pelvis as its apex, fleshed out now with veins and hearts and gut.
