Gardiner’s boxes, minimal in appearance, yet elaborately and painstakingly fabricated, draw both from a Duchampian interest in the unseen and ephemeral as well as a totemic mysticism. The containers are meant to house secret objects, and intangibles such as ideas and emotions – most particularly anxiety. Gardiner’s works are laboured over, almost obsessively. Exteriors are stitched and later painted, and the interiors are often lined with lead, as an “anti-espionage measure”, preventing the use of x-ray photography to discover the contents.

Chris Campbell Gardiner is based in rural Saskatchewan.

Read the text Chris Campbell Gardiner: Anxiety and Concealment by Eric Cameron.