The painterly aspect of Hardy’s work is exemplified in Drift: an image of a buried room. The room’s spatial qualities are almost completely negated, flattened by the camera’s aperture into a self-consciously pictorial surface. The extreme lighting of the scene both intensifies and diffuses the objects’ textures giving the control panel an impasto effect, and the ‘earth’ the soft feel of impressionistic brush marks. The sparse furnishings conceive the scene in terms of geometric abstraction, a metered tableau of hard-edged shapes and affected concentrated colours.