Spring Sometimes Rises In Me Too

A new artist’s film by Scottish-Italian artist Sarah Hardie, Winner of the Soho House Art Prize with Bombay Sapphire, 2020/21.

“The gardener digs in another time without past or future, beginning or end. A time that does not cleave the day with rush hours, lunch breaks, the last bus home. As you walk into the garden you pass into this time – the moment of entering can never be remembered. Around you the landscape lies transfigured. Here is the Amen beyond the prayer.”
Derek Jarman (Journal Entry, 7 March 1989)

Spring sometimes rises in me too is a new artist’s film by Scottish-Italian artist Sarah Hardie, commissioned as a result of winning the inaugural Soho House Art Prize with Bombay Sapphire. This symphonic-visual-essay was written throughout lockdown in 2020 and explores a female experience of lockdown, love, desire, care, solitude, our compulsion to (re)produce and inequality , examining the marks we leave on others and the earth around us through either our care or neglect, in particular. The film will be publicly available to watch from Thursday 10 June, via www.sohohouse.com

The inaugural Soho House Art Prize was announced in June 2020 as a new global contemporary art prize to discover, recognise and support artistic talent. Created by Soho House and supported by Bombay Sapphire, the prize was judged by a highly respected international judging panel: Kate Bryan, Soho House Head of Collections; Maria Balshaw CBE, Director of Tate and Hebru Brantley, artist and Bombay Sapphire Creator.

Spring sometimes rises in me too, inspired by Hardie’s own biography and the events of Summer 2020, explores the "marks" our mothers' love and voice leaves on "us." She interrogates the resonance of mother's voice in the child, its echoes and imprints: what is lost from one generation to another; what remains; and what, when cultivated, grows. Metaphors for motherhood abound, the potential of which a thirty-something year old woman felt slowly slipping away from her over Summer 2020.

Spring sometimes rises in me too is, in parts, a duet across time incorporating a practice tape of Hardie’s mother – who trained as a professional opera singer – recorded before the artist was born. This symphonic-video-essay will chart the distance between their songs, the distance of a life in all its dreams and disappointments: a result of their female symbiotic co-creation across generations.

The title of the film is taken from a line in Zadie Smith's publication Intimations: Six Essays (also written throughout lockdown 2020), in which the writer discusses the notions of her initial vehement resistance but inevitable submission to nature, and the transformative vision of creators. Within Spring sometimes rises in me too, Hardie considers the garden, the artist's practice, and the human voice all as sites of productive creative delusion and potential. This work continues the artist’s exploration of the voice as the locus for identity, desire and longing. It is pregnant with the hope that, via the transformative power of the human voice – a conduit for our care, creativity and love – people can find common ground in a time of solitude.

“...In the wish to be desired. I turn to the other with the voice shaped by this other one: I speak in order to locate myself near you.”
Brandon LaBelle (citing Judith Butler in Lexicon of the Mouth:
Poetics and Politics of Voice and the Oral Imaginary)

In the words of the artist, “I make art so others feel less alone when they experience it and I hope that by including both my own personal truth alongside in-depth research across disciplines I cut to the root of some concerns that people experience, and perhaps shine some light on those by looking at them through an artistic lens. These include: issues of declining fertility, loneliness, longing, desire, as well as ideas around making, and wider socio-political issues concerning inequality as a human being witnessing injustice in the world (even as I recognise my own oftentimes privilege).”

The Soho House art collection is one of the largest private collections of its kind, with over 5000 art works on permanent display in Soho Houses across the globe. An integral part of Soho House’s identity, the collection plays a key role in engaging with the creative community and features work by museum level artists such as Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Lee Kit, Yinka Shonibare CBE, Nan Goldin, Oscar Murillo, Elmgreen and Dragset, Tacita Dean, Rashid Johnson, Jenny Holzer, Lynette Yiadom- Boakye, Deborah Roberts and Ed Ruscha, alongside younger and more emerging talent.

Kate Bryan says, “The first Soho House Art Prize was launched with Bombay Sapphire at a moment of great uncertainty across the world. We hoped it might provide a source of inspiration and support to artists at a difficult moment. We were delighted, moved and motivated by the incredible applications we received, especially those of the runners up and our fantastic winner Sarah Hardie. Pursuing creativity at all costs despite charting uncertain territory, Sarah has created something that speaks powerfully of the power of nature and love. Inviting the audience in through sound and movement, Sarah has conjured a personal and elegiac reflection on time and memory.”

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