Selected Exhibitions 2021-2025

Threads of Resilience: Layered Narratives of Reclamation and Repurposing.

July 2024

This project investigated how the processes and experience of contemporary art can help break the chain of mindless consumption. Considering ideas of reclaiming and reworking, the artists will use found materials from the surrounding area of DalgArt to create new artworks that reflect the location and highlight the creative potential and cultural significance of repurposing and recycling.

Embracing the inherent resilience that arises from a “make do and mend” philosophy and how it can become an impulse to drive creativity, growth, and progression, each artist has a unique approach to their practice of selecting and responding to found materials. The work created over the artists’ residency culminated in an exhibition, emphasising the transformative potential of a shift in attitude towards discarded materials and environmentally conscious ways of making.

My work responded to materials found in neighbouring barns or donated by the villagers of Dalga, such as textiles, agricultural pins, a boar’s skull and white peacock feathers. My work explores the legacy of folklore, mythologies and ritualism on our ecological thinking today alongside artistic speculation on imagined future attitudes to connecting and communing with the natural environment. I am currently researching ideas of magic making in re-evaluating our human-centric understanding of the world.

In The Thick of Things
7 November – 1 December 2025
APT Gallery, 6 Creekside, Harold Wharf,
Deptford, LondonArtists:
Cash Aspeek, Leila Galloway, Deborah Gardner,
Asaki Kan, Chris Marshall, Laura White.

In the thick of Things was part of the biennial APT SHOTS Programme
APT SHOTS is an initiative of the Gallery and Programming Subcommittee that aims to make
new and innovative use of the Gallery space.

‘Art Povera’ was a pivotal art movement in challenging the previous pre-conceptions of what
sculpture is and how it is made. It could be said its importance laid the foundations much of the
art we see now, and that nothing has equalled its radical and revolutionary ideas and artworks
since. This exhibition takes much inspiration from this radical art movement.
This exhibition will bring together experimental sculpture and installations. Six artists will
produce new, site-specific work, for the gallery at APT. Artworks with the focus on materials
and stuff that challenges and surprises in its physicality and poetic existence. The artists share
a desire for stripping back revealing the feral, the source, the nudge into existence. They work
with materials that are difficult to control, materials that are often awkward to stabilise and
resist being fixed.

Plant Power
8 March – 14 June 2025
Anna Dumitriu, Anne Geene, Deborah Gardner, Barbara Howey, Caroline Hyde Brown, Raji Salan, Aurora Sciabarra, Aindreas Scholz, Harriet Tarlo, Julie Tocqueville, Judith Tucker
Plant Power is all about how plant lives and ours interconnect. Artists who are concerned about plants in a time of climate change are finding ways to give us new intense images. Through the power of art, this is an exhibition which aims to consider the plant point of view. Plants are not merely a backdrop but take centre stage.GroundWork Gallery
17 Purfleet Street
King’s Lynn
PE30 1ER
Norfolk
UKDeborah Gardner practices as an innovative sculptor, creating imaginative, exploring vibrant and visceral assemblages, often using waste products. For Plant Power she is contributing an installation of imagined, invasive plant species, which will emerge from the top of the gallery and creep downstairs via the stairwell. Her work is process and materially led, inspired by such things as the vibrancy of cell, plant and geological structures,and, and imagined future environments. She also has half an eye to eccentric sources, ranging from Gothic Plant Horror and Sci-Fi literature films and comics to waste dumps.Deborah Gardner has a continuum of art and science collaborations. Recent projects have been supported by the Royal Society of Chemistry, Pint of Science Creative Reactions, the Zoological Society of London and the Integrated Biological Imaging Network (KCL) and have explored shared methods and processes in art and science research practice. Most recent work considers imagined plant life in future biospheres and our shifting relationship with plants. https://www.groundworkgallery.com/exhibition/plant-power

(a contemporary) Phantasmagoria. 12th May- 29th June 2024Tension Fine Art Gallery, 135 Maple Road London SE20 8LP, London SE20 8LP

‘Mothership’ is a part of the exhibition ‘(a contemporary) Phantasmagoria’, running through to the 29th June at Tension fine Art Gallery until the 29th June 2024. ‘Mothership’ refers to all sorts of things, such as neuronal networking, synaptic fusion, interplanetary worlds, illusion, futurism, human hybridity, plant life, jelly fish, and science fiction. Repurposed electrical cable waste infers a sense of transmission and conduction. Mothership descends spilling out satellites of her imagined becomings. (a contemporary) Phantasmagoria includes work by Alison Aye, Emma Lilly, Carrie Grainger, Karen David, John Bunker, EC, Ken Turner, Matthew Collins, Matt Dennis, Paul Dewis, and Alison Aye.

John Bunker writes “‘(a contemporary) Phantasmagoria’ aims to question how we might understand the word ‘Phantasmagoria’ as conjuring up the magic-lantern shows of darkened eighteenth-century drawing rooms; or, in its more recent incarnation, as Walter Benjamin’s term for the fractured, kaleidoscopic nature of the experience of modernity. This show, ‘Phantasmagoria’, looks to enlarge the scope of Benjamin’s definition, the better to take the measure of our fragmentary, collagic, screen-mediated contemporary reality.

Collage and abstraction are used to open up or pulverise both picture plane and sculptural object, rendering them as sites of complex disruptions, antagonisms and mutations formed from disparate ideas from the history of art and the (de)materiality of the life we are living now. Delicate, fragile, improvisatory processes, chaos and control, in figurative, narrative terms, celebrate, visual storytelling and the power of illusion.

‘Phantasmagoria’ reflects ironically on the sense of loss, frailty and failure by which our era, the ‘High Anthropocene’, might one day come to be defined; but it also seeks to show how current artistic practice channels the multifarious, ineffable ways in which a contemporary phantasmagoria can act upon us, thereby becoming a catalyst for change.”

Ex-Libris Gallery, Fine Art Building, University of Newcastle upon Tyne. 23 October- 10th November 2023The exhibition, ‘in betweens’, brings together the work of Deborah Gardner and Eirini Boukla to consider uncertainty and flux between process and outcome, employing craft, collage, and sculptural assemblage as modes of making to perplex set categories of art disciplines and their material form. Networks, overlaps and connectives are structural devices in this body of work, which are inspired by such things as the study of plant growth structures, energy conductive systems, and the influence of applied making as a source for spontaneous and fluid movement in space, which breaks away from rigid underpinning

Repurposed materials, such as electrical waste and cardboard, are frequently used in the exhibition to explore the generative power of materials to create new meanings. Colour is pivotal and often adds an unspecified or more frantic element to the narrative of these works. Each colour has a physical or compositional role in determining the final systems and structures.

What is this thing called materials research?
Sir William Bragg Building, University of Leeds.
1st August 2023 – present dayArtist Deborah Gardner and Eirini
Boukla and scientist Elizabeth Willneff came
together to question how artists and scientists
are equally compelled to study and be absorbed
with material idiosyncrasies, engaging with ‘stuff’
and thinking ‘through’materials.
This group of objects, test pieces and material
samples on exhibition in the Bragg building are
displayed together in no order, with the aim of
highlighting how the sciences and arts come
into a relational conversation about developing
ideas, methods and processes through an
exchange of information.

It’s Coming From Inside
Bell House, 27 College Rd, Dulwich, London SE21 7BG
13- 21 May, 2023Sarah Sparkes and Jane Millar invited artists to exhibit across two rooms in Bell House, Dulwich. In their thinking about the paintings of Impressionist Berthe Morisot, currently showing across the road at the Dulwich Picture House and the exhibition’s broader theme of ‘Windows and Thresholds’, the curators see the two different domestic spaces, and the liminal corridors between them, as places expressive of dialogues in both Morisot’s and their invited artists’ works: of confines, dreams of escape, of external inscrutability and internal passion.Gardner’s work Mycelium Shroud is shown worn by a model in a digital image on aluminium sheet and as a physical body wearable. Mycelium Shroud shifts our human-centric gaze on the world through ceremonial dress; it invites considerations of our entanglement with other living species, our shared evolutionary history with fungi and the importance of these interconnected experiences.

Borrow Pit. Huddersfield Art Gallery. 12th April – 3rd June 2023

The title Borrow Pit refers to a building term which means a hole, pit or excavation site that is dug to remove materials to be used in a construction project and acts as a response to the gallery’s location and a site about to undergo major urban redevelopment. Much as Borrow Pit might signify the reclamation or re-purposing of materials for new development, the work shown also explored and questioned themes relating to transformation or renewal. In our proposal, the Yorkshire Sculptor Group, who have a diverse range of sculpture-based practices, responded to ideas of reconstruction, regeneration, and repurposing in a variety of processes and materials to examine site as a place of change.

Purely repurposed ‘stuff’ was employed in Gardner’s works to test the generative power of materials to create new meaning. ‘Conduction’ (2023) is inspired by a tree near my workplace. The bright red berries dotted across bare branches indicated an internal vibrancy within a semi dormant organism, which conserves energy, yet still produces fruit in winter. The discarded remnants of an electrician’s wiring job were reclaimed to initiate the infrastructure for this work, the highly conductive properties of electric copper wire points to a charge of energy throughout a network, its ductile property valued in wiring mechanisms for its flexibility without the loss of strength in transmitting power. A connection is made between the electrical networks of human architectural spaces and the cellular change and distribution of energy in living species.

Senses of regeneration are continued in ‘Bud’ (2020-2023) inspired by a daily walk past a Horse Chestnut tree in the first lockdown of 2020. I observed the elaborate unfurling and shape shifting of a sticky bud becoming an emerging flower. The engagement allowed an invaluable lesson in intense slow looking. At a time of not knowing and trepidation, this seasonal emergence signalled a sense of hope.

‘Time Capsule’ (2011-2023) is a work revised and regenerated from 2011, its original intention was, in part, to memorialise the coal and textile industries. Coal donated from a small private coal mine in West Yorkshire, still functioning in 2011, is embedded within the capsule and shoddy blankets are layered on top. Reconfigured in 2023, repurposed worn clothing and plastics are now compressed within the layered block, reminiscent of sedimentary strata, indicating geological time. The materials remind us of the urgency needed in employing renewable energy, ecological building systems and a drastic re-evaluation of our attitudes to filling land with waste plastics and textiles.

16th July – 29th August 2022

This was a group Yorkshire Sculptors Group exhibition with sculpture sited throughout Wakefield Cathedral as a response to place.

Gardner’s work ‘Germination’ oscillates references from the cosmological to the microscopic, inspired by the movement of planets and moons, microscopic cellular structures and the plant world. The base pods point to planet earth or to the moss world and spores, reminding us of new life and the vital role moss plays in developing new eco systems. The colour responds to the deep full colour of the stained glass windows. Germination sprouts three branches from the original pod referring to the Holy Trinity and three further branches from each new pod to
rise out in a network of smaller nodes suggesting propagation and the beginning of new life.
The colours respond to the deep full Colours of the stained glass window.

‘Raw Edge’, 9th July – 28th August 2022

This is a Yorkshire Sculptors Group exhibition within Sunny Bank Mills Gallery situated in an old textiles mill.

This vivid exploration of materiality finds the artists drawing upon and engaging with both traditional materials such as wood, stone and ceramics, as well as found objects and repurposed materials, through a variety of processes and methods, from the traditional to the digital, in order to examine and interrogate the complex boundaries that stem from the relationships between objects, societies and the human condition.
Sunny Bank Mills’ history as a textile mill is also drawn upon widely in this exhibition, as artists such as Victoria Ferrand Scott and Linda Thompson interrogate the textile industry’s conflicts with femininity, process, and tradition.
Reflecting on the notion of ‘the edge’, the work in this thought-provoking exhibition engages with the omnifarious boundaries inherent to the human experience: political borders; the perimeters of the female experience; the tensions of colonial legacy; the borderline between industrialisation and the natural world.