Immaterial world
The multidisciplinary artist Lucy Hardcastle drew inspiration from Bentley’s pioneering new concept car to create a meditative digital landscape reflecting the symbiosis between nature and technology
For Lucy Hardcastle, the power of art lies in bridging the gap between the material and the digital worlds. The Royal College of Art graduate, who founded her eponymous London studio in 2016, likes to have a tangible starting point for every creative project. ‘I usually begin with something that has a level of familiarity and then have people question whether it’s real or not,’ she says. Thus, she often turns to classical crafts, such as glassblowing or textile design, to create her digitally rendered landscapes, which can be inspired by anything from the warp and weft of a piece of cloth to the natural distortion in a sheet of glass.
Texture, colour and sound are all vital to Hardcastle’s work, as she seeks to immerse her audience in a multisensory experience that is comforting rather than disorienting. ‘I want to create warmth, and that comes from considering human behaviour,’ she explains. ‘I always ask myself: how will this make the viewer feel?’ Being futuristic does not mean being remote from reality; her ideas come from the world around her – the beauty of the local landscape, for instance.
When Hardcastle travelled to the Crewe
headquarters of Bentley Motors to be among the first to see the Bentley EXP 100 GT, the marque’s radical new concept car, she was struck by its sensitivity towards the traveller’s needs. The sensuous, fluid design, created to celebrate the centenary of the world’s leading luxury automotive brand, puts wellbeing and comfort at its heart. The electric car includes a host of extraordinary features: nurturing light effects; air curation to bring in fragrances from the natural world; and artificial intelligence to adjust the mode of the journey to the driver’s preferences. ‘It was a beautiful object, but also steeped in humanity and craftsmanship,’ says Hardcastle. ‘I was especially interested in the juxtaposition of the historic and the modern, as that resonates so much with my own work.’ For example, the edge of the interior seating is designed using riverwood – a carbon-dated oak preserved in the peat of the East Anglian Fenland basin for more than five millennia – infused with copper to create a beautiful new material. In Hardcastle’s eyes, the co-existence of ancient riverwood with cutting-edge technology that allows for fully autonomous electric driving epitomises the forwardthinking approach of the car’s designers. ‘It points towards a more balanced ecology, one in which mobility and luxury are based on a symbiosis with nature,’ she says.
Organic materials were therefore crucial in inspiring the bespoke digital artwork, titled Terra, that she has created for Bentley. ‘I started by going to Epping Forest, in nearby Essex, to take photographs of plants or trees that would give me the textures I was looking for,’ she says. She was also drawn to the mesmerising movement of mycelium fibres, whose tendency to grow in colonies serves as a metaphor for the network-led technologies of the future.
The resulting work portrays a gently evolving ecosystem in which minuscule, luminescent fibres grow, almost imperceptibly, into a meadow full of glimmering lights.
Along with a soundscape that references the forest, it offers a hypnotic meditation on the interplay between man and nature, past and present, and portrays a gradual journey from darkness to light that mirrors Bentley’s own pioneering move towards a more sustainable tomorrow. Visit www.harpersbazaar.com/bentley-art to see Lucy Hardcastle’s completed artwork. For further information about the Bentley centenary concept car, visit www.bentleymotors. com/100years.