Huddersfieldd Art Gallery will host an exhibition of sculpture by artist Deborah Gardner on 27th August. The showcase will include sculptures selected from the Arts Council Collection, and major works made by Deborah Gardner in response to those pieces.
Yorkshire is often perceived as the home of modern sculpture and the sculptures chosen from the Arts Council Collection, housed at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, represent a range of episodes of sculpture making within Britain, which speak about a sense of place. The exhibition occupies four gallery spaces including sculptures by Ian Hamilton-Finlay, Richard Wentworth, Christine Borland, Mariele Neudecker and Alison Wilding among others.
Gardner explores how ideas of place and the nature of collections share a purpose in describing our relationship to the world around us. In this exhibition, miniaturised mountains depict large vistas, domestic vessels allude to the sea, borders of branches and sheet metal enclose space and the soft ground surfaces of blankets speak of rolling landscape or demarked territories.
One gallery focuses on ideas of time passing, allowing us to consider the transitory nature of place. Gardner’s sculptural responses act as an acknowledgement of the national collective heritage of the Arts council collection, but they also focus on the particularity of Huddersfield’s local landscape, industrial legacy and architecture. Textiles, yarn, stone and coal are employed to build the sculptural form and, in doing so, are also indicative of the way local industries have affected and shaped the surrounding landscape.
Deborah Gardner is a sculptor and a Lecturer in Art & Design at the University of Leeds. She was awarded an Arts Council Visiting Academic Award to Australia for a year. She then completed the Arts Council funded, 12 month residency at Durham Cathedral before joining the London based artist co-operative Cubitt Street Artists.
Following her move to Yorkshire, Deborah has completed residencies and Fellowships in England, Czech Republic, Spain, Belgium and Australia.
She has been a visiting artist and academic to several educational institutions. Her work has been exhibited widely in both group and solo exhibitions in the UK, Europe and overseas. Deborah has recently exhibited in the group exhibition, European Sculpture: Diversity in Practice (2010) at the Nave Gallery in Turin, organised through the German based international group Sculpture Network and the touring group exhibition, European identity, Insel galerie, Berlin (2010) to the Central Museum of Textiles in Lodz, Poland (2010). The exhibition will be continue to San Arenas, Spain and Urbania Italy this year. Deborah is currently a member of the artists’ and academics’ network Land2 and Sculpture Network.
