Detached features a makeshift structure populated by charts, diagrams, individual letters, stencils and connecting cables. Anne Hardy (born 1970) has carefully constructed every aspect of this scene, using material found in DIY shops, skips and jumble sales. Under harsh overhead strip lighting, the result is a fabricated, abandoned environment with its own peculiar logic with elements that cannot be quite resolved.As Hardy commented in 2007: ‘I put a lot of specific things into the image, without making specific references, so people can bring different things to it. There is not single explanation. I wanted to create the feeling that there are unfamiliar systems at work here.'
Another work by Hardy in the Government Art Collection is
Outpost (2007), an image of a curious, unsettling space that appears to be the interior of a wooden shed or a laboratory, filled with a profusion of globes, diagrams and cables.