During a long scientific and engineering career at the University of Birmingham, Chris Hardy continued to develop her interest in art.  Her diverse portfolio included theatre and costume design, caricatures and illustrations for books, stained-glass designs, garden accessories and pub beer mats. 
She describes her strengths as “being interested in everything”, and her weaknesses as “being interested in everything”.  Although initially joining the BA Fine Art course at Birmingham University to paint, the disciplines on offer tempted her to try a wide variety of techniques, such as working with textiles, animation, print-making and large scale sculpture.  Her taste in art ranges from a childhood love of Jan Pienkowski’s  silhouette animation, to Anselm Keifer and the Irish artist Rita Duffy. and more recently to the square-headed figure in the work of Julia Oschatz.    Local sculptures by Rose Garrard and a series of slabs of text over a Black Country bridge, connected with the exploitation of 19th-century workers, inspired interest in two specific historical  incidents:
1.  In 1920, women chainmakers, known as “The White Slaves” went on strike for better pay and conditions.  Images of elderly women with chains around their necks were  used in newspapers to show their plight. 
2. The 1922 Tipton Catastrophe when 19 young girls were killed while emptying gunpowder out of brass cartridge cases.  Their employer was selling the metal  illegally and was jailed for five years. 
Chris’s subsequent work relates to the question of identity.  She uses narrative, and the invention of a storyline to create lives, relationships and a relationship to local history. The main colour featured in much of her work is yellow, relating to cordite, a constituent of early gunpowder which would turn skin yellow.  
Chris would like to experiment with discretely-lit larger crystal structures allowing people to walk among them while hearing whispering voices (referencing the girls in hospital who were only recognized by the words they whispered).
These themes have led on to firing gun shots at yellow dresses to evoke the image of violence, not only against  the young girls in 1922 but against women universally. 
And on a lighter note, she has developed a story of a Lake District dog which stole walkers’ hats into an installation using hats found around Birmingham.
She has just completed a series of limited edition prints featuring her animated time-travelling creation Green.