Anna Gardiner
Human Landscape
21 February - 23 March 2006
Full colour illustrated catalogue available

Gardiner has long been known for her intense studies of people across society stranded against almost abstract backcloths. As she describes below, a new experience of her surrounds after an absence from the streets and parks of London has brought additional concerns into the paintings and place is now a vital component of the psychological direction.

Architecture and space combine with the tough sympathy of her characterisations. This is acute narrative commentary wrought from Gardiner’s rigorous painterly drive and tender simplicity.

After I had lived in New York for some years, London –my home - became alien territory to me. It was both unnerving and invigorating to feel like a visitor on trips back. I returned to the UK permanently two years ago and the tension between past familiarity and present strangeness became the backbone of these new works.

Here are everyday strangers – in their quiet streets and parks; sheltering under twilit flyovers; encountering each other on hot summer days; ignoring and bothering each other beside sheds and huts; standing mute before the made world of tower blocks and topiary – burrowing into time and memory to a world whose details we cannot recall and yet find oddly familiar.

There are moments – seared into each of us – when an individual and a landscape are no longer separate entities but become one. These moments are evanescent and pass wraith-like before us in an instant. They afford us a fleeting reflection of ourselves, of what we were, of what we may become. These are the moments to capture. The subject matter: identity coming together within a society and within a landscape.

Anna Gardiner, December 2005