Featured Artist: Jane Gardiner: Ground Floor Gallery

About The Bees. Jane Gardiner is a GP partner in a very busy inner city practice. During lockdown, whenever possible, she went walking with her camera. As a natural portrait painter, she found herself focusing on individuals - the birds, the insects, the flowers - and the bees have become the focus of her etchings.

Her prints are suited to the little things, as they express fragility, delicacy, beauty, and the robust individuality of our fellow urban dwellers - including 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 is used on occasion to emphasise the experience of these growing things within human cultural experience.

Social bees (bumble and honey bees) seem to her particularly suited to printmaking, as their natural history is of multiples, that are similar but individual. Bees have a long history of interaction with humanity, being highly prized throughout western civilisation, but never fully tamed, and have been present in Arcadian descriptions since prehistory. They are also one of the most noticeable insects on urban walks and Jane feels that their urban suitability needs to be celebrated and encouraged - especially as their numbers and variety are under threat.

Jane also has a soft spot for weeds - those plants that thrive despite the obstacles - and was glad to see that these proliferated during the initial lockdown, not being cropped in spring as normal, and hopes in future that urban centres will continue to encourage native plants to grow, encouraging biodiversity and allowing a little bit of wildness into the lives of those of us that are urban dwellers.

This exhibition celebrates the haphazardness of encounters with the natural world within an urban environment, and allows people to take a little fragment of this home with them.

Jane Gardiner has been an oil painter specialising in figurative work since 2009. She has shown widely across the UK, including in the BP Portrait Exhibition. One of her prints was shown at the Royal Botanical Society Annual Exhibition, and she has two prints accepted for this year's Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair. She regularly exhibits at the PAI, RGI and SSA annual exhibitions.