Alex Hartley

Alex Hartley’s wide-ranging practice spans sculpture, photography, filmmaking, climbing, artist publications, 1:1 scale architectural installations and participatory site-specific works. For over three decades, his work has challenged how we perceive iconic architecture and wild nature – two opposing symbols of permanence – by exposing their fragility and entanglement in utopian ideals. 

Hartley’s early work interrogated the white cube of the gallery, testing the boundaries of art’s institutional containers. This inquiry evolved into an exploration of iconic modernist architecture, viewing buildings as social experiments embedded in both built and natural environments. His work invites viewers to experience our constructed surroundings not as fixed or permanent, but as fragile and contingent. 

Taking sculpture beyond the gallery, Hartley has consistently engaged with the wider world, where questions of access, control, collapse and collective identity are tested at scale. He is actively involved in campaigning for the national right to roam and defending public access to Dartmoor National Park. 

His recent work for Dartmoor: A Radical Landscape integrates solar technology into sculptures inspired by ancient standing stones. These works operate as energy feedback loops – solar panels power lights, which heat the sculptures, triggering fans to cool them down. This speculative reimagining treats sculpture as a living, responsive system, revealing the latent animism in the objects that surround us. 

Alongside his gallery practice, Hartley has created a series of ambitious participatory artworks in the public realm. Nowhereisland, developed over 15 years, formed a new nation from a previously undiscovered Arctic island. Other durational, socially engaged projects – Dropper, Vigil, and The Clearing – have built literal sanctuaries: temporary, precarious communal spaces inhabited and activated by volunteers. Across all his work, Hartley continues a sustained investigation into architecture, secular habitation, collective living and the construction of sanctuary as a deeply human impulse to seek refuge from the world.