Kelly Gardner

Born 1976, Kettering, Northamptonshire, England.My work is concerned with time and memory, traces and absence. I use textiles and found garments to convey these ideas; fragments of lace and imprints of garments evoke traces and residues of lost and forgotten things. The memories we hold are fated to become selective, fragmented and faded, so this work is in part a reflection of the need to capture and preserve the memory through the use of the keepsake. I incorporate old photographs, christening gowns and other found objects in to the work. The dress sculptures are constructed from book pages bound up with copper wire. These page fragments are wired together, creating empty, un-wearable dresses. The books have been rendered unreadable; dissected, torn, folded and transformed, leaving stories of characters that we can only read of in disconnected fragments. The dresses are like cages, capturing objects such as keys, buttons, scissors and old photographs, caught up in this web-like form. These objects are wired in to them, like treasured keepsakes from peoples unknown lives, fragments of memories. Lit from within, they cast shadows across the walls of the objects that they contain, echoes and flickers of the past.I use lace remnants...