Strata
Gardiner’s knowledge of the Dorset coast’s complex, shifting presence spans over sixty years. He has explored it by land, air and sea, studied it through historical records as well as the most advanced techniques of digital mapping, and has returned to it, repeatedly, as a subject for his work. Strata, his most recent and extended series of paintings based upon it, addresses the section of the Jurassic Coast between Seatown, to the west, and Old Harry Rocks to the east. Every year, for five years, Gardiner visited twenty sites, using each as the basis for two line drawings (2018), four paintings on paper (2018–21) and one painting on panel (2020–22). The result is a series of one hundred paintings: an archive of responses to a landscape in flux.
Edges are an important aspect of Strata, whether the carefully cut deckled edges of the panels or the naturally deckled edges of handmade paper. The panel paintings began as door blanks made from 50mm plywood, to which Gardiner applied a sheet of 12mm poplar before creating the irregular edge that defines their perimeter. This edge is where the works’ origins can be glimpsed: where the coloured surface of the painting adjoins the unpainted, stratified materiality of the plywood. Gently undulating, this edge recalls Purbeck limestone, sawn by a wet stone cutter, before it is stacked at Landers Quarry, near Swanage.
In Gardiner’s panel painting West Bay V (2022), the wood’s surface is layered, textured and gouged horizontally to suggest the fossil-rich strata of Frome Clay and Forest Marble. The bluntness of this scoring beautifully evokes the erosion that renders the cliffs vulnerable to collapse. To the right, the coast’s profile represents a snapshot in time, poised between one rockfall and the next. Other areas, such as the sky, bring to mind the worn surfaces of urban environments photographed by Gardiner as potential source material. Flaking paint on a postbox in Arezzo, a tattered noticeboard in Crete or the colourful layers of distressed paint on a door in Portugal: the list is broad and unfolding.
