Research- Kelly Gardner

I'd been trying to remember the name of an artist for a while now. I remember seeing her exhibit about three years ago in a local gallery and the reason I was reminded of her was 1) sorting through my hard-drive and a photo I'd taken of one of her pieces and 2) the gallery is where I'm thinking of applying to host the installation but I need to type up another entry about how the competition aspect has changed and my research for this.

All I remembered about it was that there were wire dress mannequin shapes that had text bundled up into squares andsome keys mixed in as well as there being old photographs and other bits around it. A little bit of digging and I found her profile on the Saatchi gallery website.

Kelly Gardner is a British artist. Her work is based around the concept of time and memories, traces or scraps of these and also the absence in them. I remember it as being a visually stunning piece but also interesting when I read the text on it and reading again, it doesn't disappoint. She looks at how we try and preserve the memories through text or photos and it's a personal project that I find inspiring.

Part of the reason I'm looking at it is because I find it so inspirational. She's looking at identity, even if it's through a different channel to me. The memories she's using are a part of somebody or of people. The found and collected images she uses are somebody's life captured at one precise moment and it's fascinating. The presentation was also very interesting and made me curious upon seeing it for the first time.

For the text, she uses books and folds them, leaving us to read them only in a fragmented, disconnected way that leaves us wondering about characters or able to pieces them together from memory if we've read them before. This interaction that the reader can have and how wildly it'll vary from person to person and depending on how long they spend looking is also great.