The work: Samantha Gardiner, Catch me if you can, 2022. Mixed media, 63 x 127cm. Courtesy: the artist.
Victorian artist Samantha Gardiner has many fond memories of her childhood, having grown up in the Macedon Ranges surrounded by a loving family and a supportive local community. Her work Catch me if you can is a playful recollection of long hot days of making her own fun among the fields, playing hop-scotch and experimenting with paper planes. “Life was simple and carefree,” says Gardiner. These potent feelings of happiness and nostalgia are made palpable through the artist’s mixture of muted sepia tones and bright splashes of white and red. The work is a riot of line and texture, layering stretches of colour with gestural strokes to create an abstracted patchwork of memory, intersected with concrete images and phrases. Using a vast array of mixed media in her practice, Gardiner’s compositions are complex, requiring time to properly unravel. This piece reveals a little more on every viewing.