Deborah Gardner FRSS

Deborah Gardner is a Yorkshire based sculptor and lecturer for the Art & Design programme at the University of Leeds.  She is also a member of the Yorkshire Sculptors Group and LAND2 (a national academic practice- led research network). She has exhibited nationally and internationally in galleries, museums, cemeteries, sculpture parks and industrial regeneration sites.

Gardner’s sculpture explores intersections between accumulation and propagation, materiality, and multiplicity, where process-led approaches are privileged. Proximity and distance, surface tension and scale play vital roles in encountering the work; for example, a recent work concerning imagining the surface of the far side of the moon considered ways to collapse a cosmological scale to a human dimension. Other work considers the vibrancy of cell, plant and geological structures and our relationships with them. Many sculptures explore networkable assemblages, such as hives and colonies and the growth structures of physical phenomena.  Gardner’s work consistently explores mutability and adaptability in sculpture making. 

Gardner is currently continuing research into how we are shaped by our relationship with plants and futuristic hybrid human plant imaginings. Recent work has considered  plants as environmental saviours, nourishers, invaders, and as poisonous threats and uncertainty and flux in making with repurposed materials.  Exhibitions include: Phantasmogoria, Tension fine Art Gallery, inbetweens, Ex Libris Gallery, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, Bellhouse, Dulwich (2023), Borrow Pit, Huddersfield Art Gallery ( 2023), Thamesside Gallery (New Doggerland, 2020), Cannon Hall Park and Gardens (Invasive Species 2021), Sunny Bank Mills Gallery (Raw Edge, 2022), Wakefield Cathedral ( Germination 2022).  Collaboration with scientists is continuing, initiated through the Science and Art Platform Light Night event, 2017 with the scientist Dr Anke Brüning-Richardson, organised by the Zoological Society of London.  Art nd Science projects have recently been funded by the Biochemical Society and the Integrated Biological Imaging Network ( KCL).  Gardner has been engaged in an interdisciplinary project with Leeds Museums and Galleries Collections and the Cultural Institute, University of Leeds, which considers in which ways sculpture may act as a means of understanding the growth structures of specimens in their natural science collections and the New Doggerland Project, which considered changing and adapted plant life in future environments.