Although my work over the last decade or so has been and continues to be inspired by the Cornish coastline, towards the end of 2004 I visited Egypt for the first time and some of the paintings in this exhibition are based on that experience.

It seemed to me that the naturally abstracted shapes, revealed amongst the columns and windows of the temples by the intensely blue skies, related and overlapped in an intriguing way with my preoccupation with the highly structured landscape of the Cornish coastline. There is a natural transition from the architectural forms of the landscape to the actual architecture of the monuments. The method by which I paint also seemed relevant – the scouring and sanding back of the boards as with the marked and weathered ancient surfaces of the Egyptian stones.

Vanessa Gardiner, April 2006