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In the Luke Lindoe Library: Bill Gardner | Souvenirs: Home

Bill Gardner | Souvenirs

October 2024 - April 2025

 

Library Hours

Monday - Friday

9am - 5pm

Closed Saturday, Sunday and all statutory holidays. 

Email: library@auarts.ca

Phone: 403 284 7667 

Learn more about the Bill Gardner Award Fund to support second-year BFA students. 

Bill Gardner, artist, craftsman and beloved AUArts Woodshop Technician (since 2010), traveled to the other side Saturday, January 6th, 2024.  An alumnus of Alberta College of Art and Design (ACAD, 1986, Painting), Bill kept an active and multi-disciplinary practice from his home in Bridgeland. Wrapped in a beautiful garden and nearly bursting with artwork, I was awe struck when I visited him at home in the summer of 2023. Surrounded by art and friends, despite his illness, conversation was sharp and full of laughter.  

Following a tremendous turnout for his celebration of life and exhibition of work at AUArts this past June, the idea came about to hang work in the library, allowing for those who were unable to attend the event to spend more time celebrating Bill’s life and art in a space he frequented. An avid library user and friend, Bill regularly scrutinized the new shelf cart, often had a stack of magazines in the woodshop and generously offered reviews of books he had borrowed, occasionally pointing out specific work, artists or favorite passages. In many ways, the library is a means to travel through time and space. Bill created and collected many souvenirs from his travels in the library and beyond. We are grateful that his son, Guy Gardner (ACAD, 2010, Sculpture), was willing to share this work. From the publication Bill Gardner Life and Art, we have the pleasure of learning, in Bill’s own lyrical words, about his lint drawings, creative practice and keen observation of life:   

This process is not an exact science. The lint screen is a concave, pliable surface which makes it difficult to attach and remove stencils. The dates of the drawings are dictated by the weather and tradition. Mondays are laundry days and warm, dry weather begs the clothes to be hung on the line. 

Acting as a tourist on a journey through the ordinary, my clothes dryer became the tool and the lint screen the repository for manufacturing “souvenirs of the familiar”. If souvenirs function to generate narrative, these relics tell tales of last week’s accumulated dreams, desires, diseases and disappointments. These stories are muffled and bleached, unraveled, tangled, and interwoven, but try in their proud shabbiness to celebrate the dignity of the commonplace and the eternity of Monday.  

 

-Fong Ku

 

Image: "dots and numbers" in Bill Gardner Life and Art