Folds of Time – Jeremy Gardiner’s Geological Landscapes | Jiechen Gallery, China – 9 April – 29 June, 2025

Folds of Time – Jeremy Gardiner’s Geological Landscapes | Jiechen Gallery, China – 9 April – 29 June, 2025

Time is Earth’s most ancient storyteller. With its slow strokes, it etches memories spanning billions of years into layers of rock. “Folds” – the traces of tectonic movement – are nature’s poetry written in the stratified sediments of the Jurassic Coast, compressed over millennia. These rocks were born in primordial oceans, witnessed the age of roaming dinosaurs, while human history, in comparison, is but the thinnest page among them. Jeremy Gardiner’s work is a meditation on and response to such profound stretches of time.  

Jeremy Gardiner has redefined the dimensions of landscape painting through his distinctive artistic language. Over four decades of exploring coastlines, this British artist has fused geological rationality with artistic sensibility into a wholly new visual vocabulary. The poplar panel painting series featured in this exhibition crystallises Jeremy’s sustained observation of England’s southern coast, where layer upon layer of pigment constructs a visible geological epic.  

Jeremy’s creative process is itself a dialogue with time. He documents coastal transformations with the rigor of a geologist while capturing nature’s essence with the sensitivity of a poet. In the artist’s studio, he employs poplar panels, acrylic, and gypsum composites, gradually building up geological landscape with a bas-relief texture.The calcareous bedding of ancient marine sediments and the forms of contemporary art create a wonderful harmony, folding geological time into the time of creation. This creative approach not only continues the tradition of British Romantic landscape painting, but also reconstructs it with contemporary material language. Jeremy’s singular ability to transmute scientific observation into artistic expression elevates his work beyond traditional landscape painting.  

The history of human civilisation is but a single breath on the geological timescale. In Gardiner’s “geological landscapes,” abstraction and figuration intertwine. He does not merely depict scenery but seeks to capture the very texture of time: compressed instants, forgotten epochs, and humanity’s futile yet romantic endeavour to measure eternity. When his engraving tool cuts into the poplar panel, it simultaneously sculpts a monument to time. In this sense, each work is a chord struck between the geological clock and the human heartbeat, inviting us to reconsider our place in planetary history.

The exhibition will be on view through June 29, 2025. 

click text below to view descriptions in Chinese and English:  

Folds of Time – Jeremy Gardiner’s Geological Landscapes