Ms Deborah Gardner

Lecturer

BA (Canterbury College of Art) MFA (Newcastle upon Tyne)

t: 0113 34 36924
e: d.a.gardner@leeds.ac.uk

Biography

Deborah Gardner is a sculptor and 0.5 Lecturer in Contemporary Art  Practice, School of Design at the University of Leeds.  She holds two degrees and on completing her Master of Fine Arts Degree from Newcastle University, she won a  British Council Visiting Academic  Award to Australia for a year. She then completed the Arts Council funded, year  long residency at Durham Cathedral before joining the London based artist co-operative Cubitt Street Artists.

She has completed residencies and Fellowships in England, Czech Republic, Spain, Belgium and Australia. She has been a visiting artist and academic to several educational institutions, including Monash University (Aus) LaTrobe  University (Aus) Ulster University,  University of Newcastle upon Tyne (UK), Waasmuster Academie (Belgium). Her work has been exhibited widely in both group and solo exhibitions in the UK, Europe and overseas. She is currently a member of the artists’ group That which is near and the German based international group Sculpture Network.
 
She teaches within the undergraduate modules Studio Practice 1440, 1441, 2440, 2441, supervises dissertations for the undergraduate module 3660 Independent study: Dissertation .  She is module manager for Studio Practice 2441.

Teaching

Research Interests

Deborah Gardner’s research interests focus on how sculpture may engage with the embodied and the spatial, the material and the semiotic.   She is particularly interested in exploring the affective power of absence to imply presence and the correspondence that can exist between the materiality of the body and the physical processes of making sculpture.  Subject areas include;  memorial imagination, material poetics; phenomenological perception; abjection; ‘Arte Povera’ and its legacy in contemporary sculpture making; funerary sculpture from the eighteenth and nineteenth century, relations between sleep and sculpture; classical and contemporary concepts of the private and material body.

Work produced in the last four years include cast and assembled sculptures, large-scale outdoor sculpture and commissioned work, site-specific installations and several bodies of drawings. These have been exhibited in private and public galleries, museums, sculpture parks and temporary, site specific,  public spaces. Six large-scale- site-specific outdoor works were commissioned for Embodiment and completed during a Study Leave in 2003.  This established a line of inquiry that produced several further large-scale works for Sculpture Parks and Sculpture Trails and work sited in the grounds of the Museum of Domestic Design & Architecture.  Site-specific installations have been created for several projects including work for the Ragged School: The Museum of the East End.  Ongoing collaborative projects with the artist’s group ‘That which is near’ have produced exhibitions in Vienna, Brussels and Germany.  A selection of exhibitions since 2003 are listed below.

Publications

• ‘Embodiment’, (2003), one-person exhibition,  Gardner D.A, 20-21 Visual Art Centre, Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire,  accompanied by catalogue, 16pp, ISBN 0953 963632 with critical essay ‘Public Bodies/Intimate States’ by Rosemary Betterton, Reader, Lancaster University
• Hebden Bridge Sculpture Trail (2003), one large-scale outdoor sculpture, catalogue Sculpture Trail at Hebden bridge 1995-2005, (2006), ISBN 0-9553587-0-1, 978-0-9553587-0-8, published by sculpture trail at hebden bridge.
• Burghley House Sculpture Park (2003), invitation to site large-scale sculpture within the grounds of sculpture park
• ‘Networks’, (2004), one-person exhibition, Gardner D.A,  body of drawing, Albury Regional Gallery, Albury, NSW, Australia. Part of the annual ‘Works on Paper’ symposium, held at the gallery.
• ‘That which is near / Das was nahe ist’ (2004), Gardner.D.A, Thoma.A, Only Atelier Gallery, Argentenier Strasse, Vienna (April), Representation of the land of Baden-Wuerttemberg at the European Union, Brussels (June), accompanied by catalogue, That which is near, published by PRESS  Public Relations Exclusive Schlick, Stuttgart, 2005, critical essay by Dominique Lamy, writer and educationalist at the Musee Royaux des Beaux Arts de Belgique 
• ‘Haunt’, (2004), group exhibition, one large-scale outdoor sculpture,  accompanied by catalogue , foreword by Maev Kennedy, Arts and heritage correspondent , Guardian Newspaper 
• ‘Zoo-o-logical’, (2005), Knapp Gallery,group exhibition Regent’s College, Inner Circle, Regents park,  London NW1 4NS, part of research at the London Zoo and London Zoological Society
•  ‘Open Desk’ Ragged School Museum (2005),The Museum of the East End, group exhibition, site-specific installation, London E3 4RR
• ‘Eating Outdoors’, group exhibition (2006), large-scale outdoor installation, Museum of Domestic Design & Architecture, Middlesex University Centre for Excellence, accompanied by catalogue, published by MoDA, ISBN 1 85924203 0, text by Claudia Wegener , University of the Arts, sound label WEED WORKS
• ‘So near, so far / So nahe, so fern’ (2007) Kunstverein Ebersberg, Galerie Alte Brennerei, Germany, Gardner.D.A , Thoma.A.  Artist public lecture 11th November 2007.