Jorji Gardener, Tree Maps For Birds, Wayfinding, 2023. Image courtesy of James Field.
Jorji Gardener
Gallery 3
Friday 4 October - Sunday 27 October
Opening Thursday 3 October 2024, 6pm - 8pm
Gardener’s work aims to highlight ecological relationships in ways that are emotional and embodied, to encourage a more caring and responsible role for people within the wider community. Gardener responds to the growing loss of bird species and their habitat by bearing witness, and her work offers us an opportunity to make kin with other-than-human species.
Bird Guides shows a collection of illuminated spectrograms of Australian bird calls, individually hand pierced into paper, allowing for other-than-human voices to be ‘heard’.
By visually documenting the voices of our feathered friends, Gardener taps into our collective memory and provides a testimony to their lives. This work strives to piece back together what is becoming lost from our environmental consciousness.
An audio of bird song accompanies these works to create an immersive, and thought-provoking experience.
In the work Tree Maps for Birds, Gardener uses fragmentation and obscuration of historical maps to subvert the colonial powers inherent in mapping. This speaks to decolonisation and questions our anthropocentric modus operandi to ask if we can view ourselves as just one species among many. Gardener created the work using botanical inks she made from her local bushland reserve on Peramangk country in the Adelaide Hills. She then left them for many months in the reserve to weather, thus melding her relationship with place, and the agency of the materials themselves, into the work. By relinquishing ownership and power over the work Gardener allows for the other-than-human elements to have creative agency in the work.
About the Artist
Jorji Gardener is a South Australian artist living on Peramangk land, in the Adelaide Hills
In 2003 she completed a Certificate in Printmaking in NSW, and moving to Adelaide in 2004 continued studying Printmaking at the Adelaide Central School of Arts. In 2018 she completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Flinders University and in 2023 received her Honours degree from Adelaide Central School of Arts.
Gardener is a multidisciplinary artist working across the fields of drawing, printmaking, mixed media, and installation.
During a four-year collaboration with the South Australian Museum, Gardener researched an historical Ornithological collection, which became a body of work and a published book, Flight, An Illustrated Notebook of Bird Life and Loss.
In 2024 Gardener undertook a two-month arts residency in France and the UK, focussing on further research and response to species loss.
As a passionate bird watcher, her work often features our feathered kin, along with concepts of environmental philosophy. By bearing witness to environmental issues, Gardener draws the viewer into entangled stories of human, and other-than-human, to cultivate the capacity for response.
