Addy Gardner and Martin Smith, each distinct in their practice and chosen medium,
share a love of the core elements, expressing through landscape and nature, the
essence of their subject.

Treading a fine line between figuration and abstraction, Addy Gardner invites the viewer
to journey between an earthly landscape and a canvas of dreams. Her paintings aspire
to ‘Peak Experience’ where the viewer releases their sense of self to a sense of oneness within nature. Gardner commands an ability to create form, transforming the colours of earth, sky and water, to a spectrum of light and ambivalence.

Martin Smith, sculptor, is an Oxford man. He studied modern languages and has for many years been editor of the Voltaire Foundation at Oxford. Smith is delighted by language, and therein lies the key to his metamorphosis from academic to sculptor – the teasing of language out of stone. A love of Italy is core to the artist’s wellbeing. He is able to happily knit the intellect of Oxford with annual trips to Tuscany to source stone and attend annual residencies at the Centro d’Arte Verrocchio in Casole d’Elsa to secure quiet, focussed time. Working in alabaster and marble, his sculpture is organic, talkative, sensual, abstracted – his subjects ranging from clouds, flames, and wings, to seeds, buds and pods. It is at times ethereal and sometimes explicit, as in nature is the language of biology and reproduction. Smith reveals the form hidden within the stone.

Touching the Earth