Anna Charlotta Gardiner
Anna is a Finnish-Scottish mixed-media performance and installation artist. She unearths and excavates the space between myth and science, between the internal and external, heritage and dreams, to dwell in poetic tangles that commune with the natural world. She focuses on our interconnectedness with other people, with the landscape, flora and fauna, infrastructure and broader material world, near and far, past and present, manifested as mother spirits and gods.
These are not gods of motherhood, but mothers as sustainers and embodiments of their realms – the Mother of Forest, the Mother of Air, the Mother of Earth – echoing ancient Finnish animist language and expressing a feminist understanding of and respect for our world.
Anna’s practice is a form of multi-disciplinary applied animism and ritual play. With a focus on environmentalism and sustainability, she makes costumes and ‘small gods’ which she films and photographs, creating site-specific and material-led performances and installations. She uses her dog’s fur as a primary medium, using the ancient crafts of spinning and felting.