Jeremy Gardiner studied at Newcastle University, then the Royal College of Art from 1980 to 1983. He also undertook a computer graphics course at Middlesex Polytechnic, sponsored by General Electric. Whilst at the RCA, Gardiner used a computer to create vector graphics and plotter drawings that formed the basis for larger paintings and graphite drawings. His RCA degree show was a great success, and one of the paintings was bought for the Government Art Collection.

This is one of a set of four images of Stella Orsini, created in 1984 while Gardiner was a Harkness Fellow in the Visible Language Workshop (VLW) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The VLW had been co-founded by Muriel Cooper and Ron MacNeil a decade earlier, in 1975. When Gardiner arrived, it was in the process of becoming part of MIT’s newly-established Media Lab, launched by Nicholas Negroponte.

Gardiner used the Visible Language Workshop’s SYS graphics computer system to create the four images: “Whilst I was at MIT, Stella Orsini was writing her thesis about how artists were using computers creatively. She was based in the VLW and I made a series of portraits of her, combining images of her face with pictures from Gray’s Anatomy. I created a four-panel portrait, which depicts her face frozen by a flash and then peeled away slowly to reveal the musculature beneath.”