d.gardnerstudio@outlook.com

2025 Network for Time Research

Re-enchantment: The legacy of folklore in imagining the future

A collaboration between Deborah Gardner (Leeds University, Art and Design) and Irene Brown (Newcastle University, School of Arts and Cultures). The project examines the surge of interest in seeking a re-enchantment with the natural world, motivated by the belief that this is central to re-evaluating our human-centric understanding of the world and a pre-requisite for an ethical response to the state of emergency in our environment. Research was predominantly focused on the North East Yorkshire coast.

It is built upon shared interests in material culture and a belief in the vital role that contemporary art practice plays in contributing to environmental debates.

The research is towards developing exhibition proposal that examines 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.

Deborah Gardner studying protective magic objects, Pitt Rivers Museum

ships in bottles, Robin Hoods Bay Museum

Straw dolls, Pitt Rivers Museums, Oxford

Door Protection, (wood, electric cable, studio door) Deborah.Gardner, 2025

This exhibition by The Yorkshire Sculptors Group takes place in an unrenovated part of Salts Mill where we can’t help but be reminded about the nature of things: the paint peeling from surfaces demonstrating the pull of gravity and the eﬀects of age and decay, the quality of natural light on deeply textural surfaces and the sensation of our own scale in relation to this vast open space.

As artists with widely diﬀering interests and concerns we each respond to this space and title in our own individual ways, whilst recognising that it is the nature of things which connects all of our work and practices.

Deborah’s work, Invasive Species, is influenced by stories of the botanical gothic, plant invasion, imaginings of future biospheres and our reliance and relationship with plant life. The use of electric cable infers a bio hybridity, where plants and electronics or engineering form cohesive systems. The use of neon colours gives the work a strangeness, referring to both artifice and the natural.

This exhibition aims to celebrate the diversity and creativity of the Yorkshire Sculptors Group while engaging with the unique context of Helmsley Walled Garden in North Yorkshire. In keeping with Helmsley Walled Garden’s ethos, the garden encourages contemplation and an appreciation of nature and outdoor space. These concerns have been shared by sculptors throughout history and remain highly relevant today.

Deborah’s work ‘Cascade’ alludes to plant life in its strangely familiar form and setting within the plant borders. The bulbous plant like pods spouting out from hose pipe and electric cable respond to the inherent energy and propagation in plant life. Cascading down the beautiful garden walls, its vibrant yellow and green structure finds its place among the planting,

The range of YSG exhibited works demonstrate a sympathetic and enriching relationship with the garden, using a wide variety of subjects, materials, and methods. The placement and installation of the works will seek to enhance the garden’s calming spaces and therapeutic qualities, while also encouraging reflection and conversation.

This exhibition showcases art and design works that demonstrate the vibrancy and variety of practices by current academic and technical staff, and postgraduate researchers in the School of Design, University of Leeds.

Deborah’s installation, Electric Field I, placed in the large vitrine in the foyer of Clothworkers Central Building, University Road, University of Leeds, speculates on the potential of energy transmission within the entanglement of natural and human made materials.

Works in this exhibition include textiles and fashion pieces, painting, drawing and etching, photography, video and graphic design, sculpture and sound work. The contributing artists represent their research and making skills, communicating their creative and teaching specialisms to their students, colleagues, and visitors who are interested in the research culture in the School of Design.

Exhibiting artists and designers: Eirini Boukla, Ben Bradley, Helen Clarke, Kelly Cumberland, Yimiao Dai, Kenneth Feinstein, Deborah Gardner, Joe Gilmore, Yuki Koswara, Hye-Won Lim, Katie Marland, Eleanor Rambellas Roche, Hannah Sabapathy, Andrea Thoma, James Thompson, Bintan Titisari, Barbara Urrutia Badilla, Wei Wang, Yun-Ling Wang, Louise K Wilson, Paul Wilson, Zixin Yan, Zicheng Zhang

This is a Yorkshire Sculpture Group exhibition which explores a wide range of sculptural practices that engage with contemporary ideas and critical thinking. YSG exhibits regularly in a variety of indoor and outdoor venues throughout Yorkshire, across the UK, and internationally.

Deborah’s work Electric Field II considers uncertainty and flux in the entanglement of human made and natural materials. It is influenced by experimental research made by electrical engineers into how to convert the kinetic energy of tree branches into electrical energy. Set in the industrial like space of Level Zero, this installation explores an assemblage of tree branch, copper wire, electrical cables and battery power source in connection to the sunlight coming through the nearby window.

This exhibition aims to celebrate the diversity and creativity of the Yorkshire Sculptors Group featuring a thought-provoking range of approaches to sculpture making and use of materials, processes and technologies.

Artists exhibiting: Phillip Allen, Olivia Bax, Frank Bowling, John Bunker, , Jane Clarke, Karen David, Matt Dennis, Neil Gall, Deborah Gardner, John Gibbonw, Alexis Harding, Sime Hiscock, Emma Lilly, Angela Lucas, Jane Millar, Haysom Smith, Ken Turner

In the spirit of Benjamin’s multi-disciplinary writings, the selected artists, under the rubric of ‘Paint-Thing’, focus on the contemporary clashing and commingling of both picture plane and sculptural object. Since the 1960s, the discrete disciplines of painting and sculpture have courted and contradicted, seduced and denied each other. The artists in Paint-Thing re-engage with this tryst between two and three dimensions, rendering it, as Benjamin might, as a site of complex disruptions, antagonisms and mutations informed by disparate ideas from the history of art and the (de)materiality of the life we are living now.