My story

For most of my life I was a career person. Art was not the plan, and I had no particular reason to think it ever would be.

Then I became seriously ill. Recovery is not a straight line and it leaves a lot of quiet hours in it. I started making things to get through those hours, and somewhere in the middle of that the making stopped being a way of passing the time and became the point. Art became my therapy first. The rest, as they say, is history.

At some stage I decided to take it seriously enough to be taught properly. I threw up the job and went back to study at York College as a mature student, on a daily bus ride I would not care to repeat, and ended up working alongside some of the best tutors I have known. It changed my life, and I mean that plainly rather than as a turn of phrase. From there I went on to take my MA in Fine Art at the University of Leeds.

I work now from a studio in Weardale, in County Durham.

What I make, and why

Every piece begins with a photograph. Sometimes it is an anonymous one, bought or found, of people whose names nobody remembers. Sometimes it is my own, of a chair or a jug or a wall. Then I start taking things away. Layers are removed, softened and reimagined until only what feels essential is left.

What survives is almost never the object. A chair stops being furniture somewhere in the process and becomes the residue of the people who sat in it. Parts of it hold. Parts fall away. The empty ground around it ends up carrying as much weight as the fragment that remains.

Some pieces are stitched rather than painted. Stitching is slow and deliberate and it slows the act of looking down to match. On The Smallest Among Them I stitched only the coat of the youngest child in an anonymous family photograph, not to restore what had been lost but to draw attention to one quiet presence among the group.

I think often about the lives held within ordinary things, and about how absence can still carry weight.

I hope my work touches you, the viewer, by reminding you of someone or something previously forgotten; my ultimate hope is that you will linger just a moment longer. Bronia Gardner

If any of it has that effect on you, I would be glad to hear from you.

See the work

In short

Training

MA Fine Art, University of Leeds. Art and design at York College, 2018 to 2019.

Based

Weardale, County Durham. Working since 2019.

Media

Digital painting, archival pigment prints on paper and canvas, hand stitching.

Recently

Things That Were, a solo exhibition at The Station, Richmond, and selection for the Northern Summer Exhibition at Newcastle Arts Centre. Full exhibition record.