This print was created in conjunction with the Glasgow Print Studio 50th Anniversary Here & Now Legacy Project. Gardiner is a GP partner in a very busy inner city practice, so she went walking with her camera when possible during the lockdowns. As a natural portrait painter, she found herself focusing on individuals - the birds, the insects, the flowers. She was featured artist at the Print Studio in September 2022; the etchings she exhibited expressed fragility, delicacy, beauty, and the robust individuality of our fellow urban dwellers. This included unwelcome ones, such as dandelions and flies - and let her express her delight in these small things. They are brilliantly observed, beautiful and beguiling, delicate and finely detailed, seemingly casual, always fluent, crisp and precise – but taking advantage of accidental marks to express the urban environment, where scratches and tears are to be expected. Lettering was used on occasion to emphasise the experience of these growing things within human cultural experience. “Suspended In The Sky” developed from this body of work, now looking to the skies to see what birds are flying above us in Glasgow, along with the moon and the occasional human. Text is used in this instance to note how the skies are emptying of birds, as well as the almost universal wish that we could fly (and that most of us have dreamt of doing so).

Jane Gardiner was born in the south of England in 1974. She is from a Glasgow family and grew up in Ayrshire, moving to Glasgow in 1992 to study medicine. She has been living in the west end (on and off) ever since. Since 2009 she has shown her figurative oil paintings widely across the UK, including in the BP Portrait Exhibition, RSA, SSA and Mall Galleries. She attended the Glasgow Print Studio for a weekend etching course in 2018, and learnt to print at home during the lockdowns. She was a featured artist in September 2022, where her etchings focused on the little things seen (bees and weeds) on urban walks, and is very grateful for the support the print studio gave her. She enjoys working on a smaller scale, with line and in black and white, as it contrasts with her use of oils. One of her prints ('Of Ivy') was shown at the Royal Botanical Society Annual Exhibition, and she has had two prints accepted for the 2022 Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair.