Bio

Teal Gardner (b. 1984, Albuquerque, NM) is an interdisciplinary artist, living and working in Boise, ID.

Her work uses historical and present day development as sites for inquiry into interrelationships among human and more-than-human beings.

Her ongoing curatorial project, The Ecogeoglyphic Observatory, is in its third year.

Teal has received support from the Boise Arts and History Department, the City of Boise Arts and History Department, The Idaho Commission on the Arts, A Blade of Grass, MING Studios, The Alexa Rose Foundation, The Union for Contemporary Art and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. She is currently a Frontier Fellow with Epicenter, located in Green River, UT, and part of the Alexa Rose “Show and Tell” Artist Residency at The Common Well in Garden City, ID.

She holds a BA in Anthropology from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln and a Masters Degree in Fine Art from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque’s Confluence MFA program.

Statement

Drawn to the marks engraved in the land by the forces of capital and empire, I endure a painful obsession.

I find myself present within ruin and scars, searching for the connective tissue of a relationship that runs through everything. I look for material reverberations through time and fixate on the materials that are forced into forms that violate their origins. I work with aggregates of this matter: at once agential, mutable, and existing within deep time, I am a companion of the material.

Through forging this connection, I am attempting to touch down to earth. Within the present modes of living that I and everyone I know are conscripted to by birth, I wonder how to build relations of care with people and with more than human worlds. How do we sensitize to the living world and each other? And how can sensitivity to the living world give us a chance to change how we live?

I ask questions through community facilitation, collaborative research, photography, writing, sculpture, installation, video and sound.