Manual

Manual is a limited edition book, and works about hand acting as an exemplar of batch-production involving different repeatable image-making techniques, innovations in fading and burning, metal stamping and the laser cutting of wood. It continues Hardie’s ongoing research conducted through collecting and classification as a systematic design method, exploring relationships to cross-disciplinary batch-production, and sequential and book design. With specific reference to this and to his wider body of research, Hardie has a central interest in the hand and the handmade, in non-gestural drawing alongside observation, wordplay and visual anecdote and in the construction of rules that create a work both auteurial and game-like. Hardie’s design process is articulated in Profile / George Hardie, Dan Nadel, The Rules of the Game, pp. 38-45, illustrated Eye 58, Vol. 15, Winter 2005, and the essay 'Drawing - My Process', George Hardie, pp.126-38, illustrated in Drawing - The Process, ed. Duff and Davies (Intellect, 2005). Rian Hughes’s review of the Manual exhibition at the Pentagram Gallery: “Described by George Hardie as the process of ‘going amateur’, this is more of a book of ‘graphics without clients’ than an artist’s book and contains some 90 images and inserts, many with hand made elements: tipped-in silk-screens, found objects, sign language charts and road kill glove images. Taking the theme of all things hand-related they display Hardie’s fascination with the printing process, using a limited colour palette, type/image counterpoint, the re-contexuralised informational chart or sign, the found woodcut image and the verbal and typographical pun…Relating a narrative is part of Hardie’s fascination with image – a narrative often delivered in a single frame, of some event that has passed…George Hardie is that rare breed: an illustrator with an exquisite sense of type and design, and a designer who can actually draw.” Eye 55 Vol.14 Spring 2005.