Artist's Statement

I produce works at the intersection of drawing, collage and print-making; paintings and poetry. In all mediums my overwhelming research interest is the disclosure of the history of mark-making and a layering of meaning. My work aims to articulate both surface reality and underlying meaning. I am keenly aware of the distinction that locates experience within the body, or haptically within the body's physical range, and can therefore be anchored to the experience of tactile surface or of colour to field of vision.

I interrogate the possibilities of scale to bring about a new meaning through the deliberate change of relationship between viewer and the work. According to a theorist of the Sung dynasty the viewing of an object in dimensional space allows shifting perspectives: "the principle of viewing the part from the angle of totality" - so that to be in the same relational space allows both the whole object to be seen and the possibility of being drawn into a more intimate viewing distance to engage with the surface. This was later echoed by Marc Rothko quoted in "A Symposium on How to Combine Architecture, Painting and Sculpture" published in Interiors (1951). He states "To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience, to look upon an experience as a stereopticon view or with a reducing glass... However you paint the larger picture, you are in it"

Currently in printmaking I am working with commercial card stock which I alter, incising marks into their printable surface. These are exhibited as works in their own right not as adjuncts to stored or re-printed meaning but the site of the activity of making art. In some instances no print has been made from them in a deliberate refusal to reform to the expectations of process.

- Angela Gardner

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