Jane Gardiner: Taking Wing

About the artist

Jane Gardiner is an oil painter and etcher whose practice is increasingly defined by time spent on the coast. Her work explores the themes of freedom and movement, drawing parallels between the natural world and the human experience. Whether working on a plate or a canvas, she focuses on the instability of weather and the challenge of capturing transient moments in permanent media.

In her etchings, Gardiner uses the behaviour of birds in flight to examine the relationship between the individual and the collective. By observing flocks, she considers the patterns that emerge when many small, autonomous decisions form a larger, unified motion. This tension between personal impulse and shared direction is a central preoccupation in prints such as Taking Wing.

Gardiner’s paintings move toward the openness of the sky and sea, reflecting a direct response to shifting light and water. She has adapted her life-drawing discipline to the outdoors, working plein air to record the immediate conditions of the shoreline. This immersion is supported by practical experience, including a week spent drawing seabirds with the Society of Wildlife Artists and a residency working as crew on a yacht in the Inner Hebrides.

Across both strands of her practice, Gardiner avoids fixed outcomes, choosing instead to acknowledge change and uncertainty. By focusing on the strength of water and the impermanence of the weather, she creates work that reflects the freedom found in responding to one’s immediate surroundings.