The main components of my recent subject matter in the Interspace Series are selected fragments from my photographs of space and various objects, cut and/or folded, and hand painted and printed papers. As a painter and collage artist, my Interspace series explores the translation of three dimensional paper shapes into two dimensional color designs, in a further exploration of the relativity of color, figure/ground and negative spaces. With these fragments I compose abstract compositions. These studies for my large scale oil paintings are focused on space, shapes, shadow and light.

For many years I have been absorbed in the process of creating the illusion of transparency in my paintings. With oil paints I mix separate notes of color to approximate light as it is reflected or refracted on various planes observed in nature and man-made objects. This process has continued with the Artifact and Interlusion Color Series. My central concern in The Artifact Color Series,  begun in 2018, is the concept of phenomenal transparency; I employ opaque mixtures to achieve the illusion of transparency in the medium of oil paint. These are inspired by Josef Albers’ Homage to the Square series and are collages created with painted woodblock papers. They are the oil paint mixtures from current paintings, influenced by the seasons and local weather.

The Interlusion Series, begun in 2019, combines the Artifact Color Series collages with a return to trompe l’oeil paint handling in the interest of capturing subtle gradations of veils of color as they arc and flow over the compositions of the Artifact Color Series with some transparency. Interlusion blends two or more sensibilities of spatial and atmospheric relationships in two dimensions to capture the transparency effects and the multiple layers of colors and their interactions. The sense of atmosphere between the layers imparts a feeling of landscape to these paintings.

-Ginnie Gardiner, 2022

‘Where reductive formalism (“Greenberg”) would see an unresolved contradiction I see a synergistic interplay that gives both kinds of transparency more meaning and value than either would have in isolation. It’s an expansive interplay, which gives these works a large scale and landscape atmosphere.’

-Carter Ratcliff, 2019

‘Gardiner’s earliest uncollages fuse conceptually complex topics, but visually champion minimalist aesthetic, despite the amalgam of genera present in single work – abstraction, surrealism, pop art, photomontage, dechirage, trompe l’oiel. What holds together her elegant partnerships between form and content is an exquisite sense of light and color.’

-Todd Bartel – excerpt from ‘Before It’s an Uncollage’ – Kolaj Magazine, 2019

‘Nearly always, the formal structure—and space itself—is more compact in the collages than in the paintings. The collages, of course, are smaller and yet that is not the entire explanation, for the details of Gardiner’s images acquire a charge of condensed pictorial power from having been developed and refined in the more intimate medium. Transposed to canvas, her images gain not only in size but in scale. They feel larger, more open. Yet they lose none of the intimacy or the intensity bestowed on them by their origins.’

– Carter Ratcliff, 2018

‘Of course each artist has a distinctive way of unsettling our habits of seeing. With the sunlit stillness of her paintings, Gardiner seizes our attention and holds it with pictorial subtleties that show us, by stages, that stillness is not stasis. Presenting a precisely calibrated balance between figurative images and the harmonies of sheer form, each of her paintings oscillates between these two ways of seeing. Subliminal at first, this oscillation becomes conscious as we begin to see ourselves seeing. Encouraging us to be aware of how we make sense of the raw data of vision, Gardiner reminds us of our responsibility for the look – and the meaning – of our world.’

– Carter Ratcliff, 2015