HARD LOVE
May 15 - August 1 2026 Tick Tack, Antwerp
Exhibition Introduction Text By Marie-Charlotte Carrier
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.
An architecture of feeling assembled piece by piece. Yet Antagonist's scale exceeds the intimate. Standing near it carries the specific unease of proximity to heavy machinery, the sense that you should not be this close.
There is a useful adjacency in Julia Ducournau's Titane (2021). Not in the violence but in the rawness. The film's protagonist Alexia, impregnated by a Cadillac, finds her body overtaken. Motor oil where blood should flow. The industrial and the biologically fused until they are indistinguishable. The coexistence of tenderness and violence inside a body being destroyed is the condition Perry makes the ground of her own work. A body generative and exhausted at once: the capacity for tenderness and the evidence of exhaustion are the same thing.
To descend through the exhibition is to go deeper into that body. The basement has the quality of an engine room. A deep resonant hum runs through it, as if something down here is still breathing, exhausting itself through the architecture. Industrial ventilation pipes pierce the structures that contain them, growling. Perry insists on this pre-linguistic register of the body, the somatic knowledge that precedes and often exceeds the frameworks imposed upon it. Sound functions here the way it does throughout her practice: as a physical event! A low-frequency pressure that registers in the chest before it is recognized as anything else.
The body in Perry's work is never just a body. It is a body that has been interpreted. Managed and projected onto and sorted into categories it did not choose. The pelvis becomes a monument and then a medical fact and then a social event. Coming into labour. She grew up in the post-industrial North of England, in a landscape shaped as much by the proximity of heavy industry as by its systematic dismantling. What Mark Fisher, drawing on Derrida's concept of hauntology, might describe as a place haunted by futures that were promised and never delivered. By the spectral presence of a working-class culture whose material conditions had been eroded while its emotional residue persisted. What remains is the ghost of that relationship. Perry's work does not romanticize this condition. It takes it seriously as the ground from which her materials and her forms emerge. Her work is alive to the ways those structures seep into the body, shaping its rhythms and its capacity for emotion. She is equally alive to the way the body exceeds those structures. Leaks out of them. Continues to pulse and gush beyond what is sanctioned or legible. Hard Love is the record of that double movement. A heart, lodged in steel.
deep house
A sonnet by Danielle Wilde
the sound of the house settling at night
spent heat of some great beast I’d slain again
thin walls drum their hidden circuitry; fingertips,
naked bulbs, this old wiring, this deep internal material
I thought, it is beginning and in the backyard
strange flowers bloomed black through the
bruised scalp of night, sweating, I opened the taps
and a thin wire of violinists strung down the drain.
All my teenage madness. A wolf at the door,
a dog in the kitchen, her phantom pregnancy, her
litter of hot tin ghosts rattling the cutlery drawer.
I thought, the beginning always feels like this, like the end.
I always go too far. My appetite for ruin, my mornings after
when tooth white birds drink from ashtrays filled with rain
What If. A text by Rosanna McLaughlin.
What if, when you gave birth, it wasn’t only the ligaments of your pelvis that stretched and frayed like fleshy rope, allowing your bones to open, you body to redefine itself, allowing another being to tear right through you? What if it wasn’t only your body that ripped and duplicated in this act of equal parts magic and carnage, but your sense of self? What if, whoever you thought you were before, in that moment you became something else, became part of something completely enormous and ancient and utterly indifferent to you?
And what if this new you doesn’t align with the past you? What if you’re tormented by the dreams you had before? If you were a building, would your foundations crack under the pressure? What’s that locked up in the basement? Another version of you, a ghost, a thudding baseline, a memory of freedom, of sticky floors and getting fucked and running your nails down someone’s back and throwing your arms around a friend you just made, or a friend you’ve known for years, either way, someone with whom to give the big fat finger to suffocating normalcy in the toilet at 4am? A feathered version of you with giant talons and a hedonist’s heart, but an idealist, too, who lives for their friends and the promise of the world they can build together, a world of communal living and pooled resources and kicking, always kicking, at the edges of what’s possible. A version who is not welcome at the school gates, who cannot stand and talk to other mums about kitchen conversions and wood-burning stoves and whether organic snacks are actually as healthy as they say they are and ballet lessons and swimming lessons and soft play centres and corner sofas and husbands who earn more but do less and never appear at pick-up time. A version who is so alarmed by the contrast between who you feel you are and who you are expected to be that it must be hidden from view, pushed down the stairs and into the dark, and yet she calls to you, her baseline echoes through your arteries, pumping through your blood-vessels, asking who have you become.
Because what if you never belonged to that world of school-gate chat, anyway? What if it was never your mother tongue. What if it’s a language for which, sure, you have learnt some of the vocabulary –mortgage, tutors, Ocado delivery – even if you could never speak it with a convincing accent. What if it’s not something you can sneer at, secure in the comfort that comes from thinking yourself above a thing to which you ultimately belong, thinking you’re somehow different to those losers, but only different in the way that twins feel different, when their mum gives them money to buy something from the gift shop, and they choose two identical hats but in different colours in order to show the world how unique they are? What if it makes no difference to you if you choose red or blue, if the hat is otherwise fundamentally the same? What if, where you came from, nobody wore those hats at all. What would happen if you wore the clothes that people wore where you came from? What would they say at the school gates then? Would they tighten the belts of their woollen coats, tighten the muscles of their faces? Would they stop inviting you to soft play, or would they invite you more, frisky at the brush with realness, the promise of a project?
What if we are all a collection of fragmented, contradictory visions of a person? Like looking out over the city from the top of a tower block, and seeing all the conflicting ideas for how a place should be, skyscrapers and low-rise council housing and Victorian terraced streets, post-modernism and utilitarianism and a tents beneath bridges and slum housing latterly transformed into desirable real estate; like seeing a hundred different identities that make no sense alongside each other but which somehow coexist. What if you took a cross section of your brain and you, too, were a hundred different visions of a person, but thank god your consciousness has evolved to trick you into thinking there is continuity, that there is a single version of you, that you make sense, that you have a story that can be followed, that you are moving in one direction and your life has a coherent meaning. But what if – oh shit, oh no no no – what if one day this genius trick your brain plays on you stops working? What if your sense of self shatters like a window, a big bay window on a nice terraced street near a good school and some lovely independent coffee shops, a window that some little prick on a bike has thrown a brick through for no particular reason other than why not. What if you saw all the versions of yourself lying on the carpet of the front room, a thousand shards of you, old and new, and there was no way of piecing them back together. What if you held the shards in your hands, and the jagged edges drew blood? Would this not be terrifying?
What if you were able to see, too, how many selves are bound up in the construction of just a single one of those buildings that make up the skyline? What if, as well as the person rich enough to buy the home or poor enough to struggle renting it, you also saw the men who cast the foundations, rolled the steel, laid the bricks, plumbed the water supplies, saw the women who stayed at home, sometimes coping sometimes not coping, sometimes cooking and cleaning and looking after children and sometimes not, depending on how successfully they managed to hide their ambitions in the deepest crevices of their souls, or how successfully they subsumed their wants and needs into the role of mother. What if you could see this social history that hangs around every building, and it wobbled and glowed like a giant ectoplasm? A ghost of labour rarely acknowledged, except in those moments where the outcome is so severe that it splits through the skin of the world, bursting into sight, like the poor bastards who built the pyramids or the football stadiums in Qatar?
What if you realised that the soft furnishings inside your own home were in fact cast in concrete. What if, unknown to anyone else, the roof had blown off, and heart-shaped balloons had got tangled in the twisted and exposed metal rebar. This is not trad-wife. This is not cottage-core. This is not tending to your kitchen garden, darning tiny socks, cuddling your babies by the wood-burning stove, baking bread with ancient grains, wondering what will happen to your vegetable delivery on Tuesday when you’re at Pilates. This is not breast is best or linen tea-towels. This is not skylights and inside-outside living and kitchen islands and just managing to squeeze the new sofa through the hallway and into the front room without having to take the door off the frame, or putting little felt stickers on the bottom of the mid-century dining chairs so the kids don’t scrape the terracotta tiles. This is a reckoning with the brutality of intense psychic change. This is standing with your eyes wide open and every nerve on end and feeling the full force of an ancient identity crunching your bones. This is remaining awake during the operation. This is seeing beyond what you’re meant to see, and in the process attaining a knowledge as profoundly beautiful and full of possibility as it is disgustingly painful. This is touching the rawest material. If you slip you could crack your skull on a concrete curtain. This is a haunted house.
