I am an artist inspired by the living planet. The main focuses of my work are: climate change, human impacts on the environment and systems of land management and ownership. I work in a range of different mediums including painting, drawing and mixed media.
I am currently working on a series of paintings based on the theme of wildness: what it means from both a personal and societal perspective. I have been working in an almost automatic way to produce abstract landscapes. As a starting point are places I have been to and photographed but I am also referencing patterns taken from aerial pictures of degraded landscapes.
Using paint, old maps and pages from fairytales as collage, I am allowing these paintings to work their own way through my thoughts and feelings about wildness drawing on fairytales of my childhood and times when I was free to play and wander; exploring and imagining wild. Secret paths though imagined places of my past and future intermingle with a hope that Britain could/should be wild again. Primarily I would like to help highlight and fight against environmental degradation in my local area and in our country and in doing so, allow people to forge a better understanding of these issues.
Britains ecology is in a dire state. ‘The government’s own assessment, published in August 2016 found that a hundred and fifty of two hundred so-called priority species are still falling in numbers across the country and we are in imminent danger of losing 10-15 percent of our species overall. It is tempting to assume that such declines are no different to the rest of the world. But they are different. Using the ‘biodiversity intactness index’ – a new system that measures the condition of the country’s biodiversity – the updated 2016 State of Nature report discovered that the uk has lost significantly more biodiversity over the long term than the world average. Ranked twenty-ninth lowest out of 218 countries, we are among the most nature depleted countries in the world. (Tree, 2018 Wilding) ‘The world lives within us: we live within the World. By damaging the living planet we have diminished our existence.’ (Monbiot, 2017, How Did We Get into this Mess?)
I would hope that my work demonstrates a desire to be heard on key environmental issues. I am interested in actively participating in the global quest to increase biodiversity levels through rewilding and believe passionately that we need systematic change to positively effect the levels of greenhouse gases we are emitting, or more specifically, which large corporations in industry are emitting. On a local level, I hope also to challenge the control which large building developers are having on our rural areas. As is often the case in a capitalist country it is not always the ‘need’ that is pushing this momentum. Large developers, speculators and farmers seem to be making the most gains in the form of huge profits, and lobbying the government to allow for this. Subsequently, the negative effect of this on ecology as well as the effects on the safety of our towns from flooding, pollution and climate change is threatening our lives and very existence.
I also believe that we need to be allowed access to land in the form of ‘The Right to Roam’, as is the case in Scotland, for the public to observe what state land in Britain is in and play a part in allowing it to flourish. As humans we need access to nature and currently in Britain the public is only allowed access to 8% of land. ‘….the wood, the structures and how they operate on the mind, are entirely different from those of the city. Nothing tries to sell you anything, nothing forbids access, no spaces have been designed or designated. Here, the mind unbelts. The grid has been replaced with a calm chaos, the straight lines of roads and rationalism are sunk in the smooth curves of beech boughs, wooden flights of fancy and the dazzling spray of bright green, free-flowing thought.’ ‘We need space for the mind to rave, to wander and to dream[…]access to nature is access to our own wild, spiritual mind.’ (Nick Hayes author of The Book of Tresspass.)
I live and work in beautiful West Oxfordshire with my children and dog and have been exhibiting and selling for around 20 years.
For those of you who know her work, you will find that Addy has moved on from what you might expect. She is painting beautiful and complex landscapes composed of layers of oil paint which individually retain both substance and translucency. The effect is to capture the fluidity of the firmament – sunlight spilling through clouds, earth and sky bathed in luminosity. Her subject is the landscape that she encounters around her which she recreates in the studio as photographic panoramic ‘sketches’. From that visual reference point, Addy creates paintings that echo her memories, thoughts, dreams and emotions – moments of ‘peak experience’. There is a strong autobiographical element in her work that colours her compositions with titles such as “The memory of the moment we first met”. An artist invites us to share their journey, yet the success of a painting is also determined by their ability to invite us to make our own. Addy Gardner is chasing beauty, and is successful on both counts.
Moving seamlessly between configuration and abstract expressionism, Addy Gardner invites the viewer to journey between an earthly landscape and a canvas of dreams. Her painting aspires to ‘peak experience’ where the viewer releases their sense of self to an awareness of a greater unity. Addy commands an ability to create form, transforming the colours of earth and sky to a spectrum of light and ambivalence. Working in oil on canvas, Addy’s paintings are infused with vitality, imparting energy and a sense of joy.
Jenny Blyth Fine Art
