‘Fist I’ is part of a series of large paintings Hardie produced based on her own body, applying the paint with a sponge in order to achieve bold surface and colour effects. She produced these shortly after studying with the German artist Georg Baselitz who had a profound effect on her work. Describing the works in this series as “inching the way forward”, Hardie continues to produce large scale, close-up paintings of the face and body today. In them she “want[s] to create the sense of being so close-up to the subject, that the subject becomes both immediate as a real presence and at the same time mysterious and elusive”.