Discover Cleo Gardiner Artist

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 My Honours dissertation and current Masters is concerned with processes involved in re-imagining identity/ies, whereby the possibilities for re-imagining ourselves are opened up and explored. Where experimenting with ways to re-imagine our identities can precipitate a process birthed in and from a rupture. This rupture is two-fold for a marginalised person. It involves a destabilising of subjected notions of class, gender and institutionalisation in relation to dominant culture; and simultaneously stems from a crisis of self. This process of rupturing enables a situation where a re-imagining can take place and strongly relates to what Deleuze and Guattari term becoming, an ever-evolving process of invention and re-invention.  This brings forth a new hope and a new territory or lens through which to view identity, where a person can play a leading role in the generation and production of a kind of future that is unlike the present.   Please see corresponding artwork Class-If-Y a felt concrete poem below.

 

 Cleo's work often includes text which illustrates how words can inspire, rupture and embrace ones self. She suggests, through text and icons, we see parts of ourselves mirrored as a jigsaw of positive and diverse referents. Ones, which observe and honour our varied differences. Through works like XX-Class/if/y she celebrates the joy of words and how they mark, commemorate and even liberate us. Her collages of text, map  identity as both a cultural and collective memory; illustrating a personal journey, an unravelling or unbecoming to become. 

Cleo Gardiner is a contemporary and conceptual Australian artist, based in Brisbane. Her work explores the complex and often, contradictory relationship/s we have with our identities.

Investigating and questioning the multiplicity of identities has remained a central concern in Gardiner’s practice. From earlier works which reference the canon of portraiture and religion and explore issues relating to identity, icons, desire, class, sexuality, size positive representations of the body, gender & gender identities.