Fiona Jardine

About

Jardine was born in Galashields in 1970. She gained a BA (Hons) Fine Art from Duncan of Jordanstone, Dundee in 1998 and a MFA from Glasgow School of Art in 2003. Recent exhibitions include 'Sweeney' (solo) at Intermedia Gallery, Glasgow in 2005 and the group exhibitions 'April is the Cruellest Month', Transmission, Glasgow and 'Madame la Baronne' at Centre d'art Mira Phalaina / Maison Poulaire, Montreuil, France, both 2006. Jardine has just completed a residency at The Pumphouse Gallery, London. She lives and works in Glasgow.
Thresholds, monuments and associated graveyard symbols such as skeletons and crosses appear in the recent pencil drawings, wall paintings and sculptures of Fiona Jardine. There is a lucid and direct quality to her two dimensional works, in which cleanly outlined skeletons pose on white walls, or meticulous pencil marks inscribe the shape of plant forms growing over sepulchral crosses and arches. In contrast, the densely worked surfaces of her faux monumental sculptures have an intentional corporeality. Jardine makes minimal forms like a cylinder, a cube or a door lumpen, encasing them in amorphous drooling strands, 70s style gothic tendrils or decorative panels of pleats and patterns. These pieces are often fashioned from physically light materials such as papier mache and expanded polystyrene and partially acquire their air of weightiness through their outer coating of brown or black gloss paint. The unctuous shine of these sculptures reinforces the spareness of her drawn work, equivalent to a bracelet of bright hair encircling a skeletal wrist.
Sarah Lowndes