Jurassic Coast

Surrounded by gentler and more gentrified counties, save for its embattled border with the sea, Dorset instantly presents itself as a place apart – even at the subtlest northern edges mobile phone signals can thrillingly cease. We have enjoyed the most dramatic approach of all, crossing Poole Harbour on the chain ferry from Sandbanks to Studland, for an exploration of the Isle of Purbeck and the origins of Jeremy Gardiner’s life-long fascination with Britain’s Jurassic Coast. Like a partly opened concertina, this craggy and shingly swathe of Dorset and east Devon shoreline folds and stretches for 95 scenic miles, with rocks forced up vertically by tremendous subterranean pressure and then cast into fantastic formations due to unequal resistance to the pounding of the sea. The tides sculpting stacks, caves and arches and great banks and arcs of boulders and pebbles also open the much older burial grounds of dinosaurs. Lately awarded World Heritage status, the Jurassic Coast is steadily yielding stony secrets from 185 million years of tumultuous history. But all interest for our revisiting artist ends soon after Lyme Regis, abruptly at the county border, for beyond lies the legacy of arid monotony from a primeval red desert. Panoramic Gardiner pictures are deeply researched and densely structured, with added perspectives of time and distance. ‘Dorset is the baseline for all my work, the one place I go back to,’ he says. ‘It’s important to leave and then to return in order to understand a place properly – you’ve got the contrast and context then.’

Ian Collins