Ian Gardiner spent four years at Swinburne Technical College in Hawthorn, Victoria, graduating in 1964 with a Certificate and Diploma of Art.
The combined influences of contemporary abstraction, traveling in Asia and a greater exposure to Eastern and Western art impacted upon Gardiner's work and he became interested in how colour could be arranged to set up optical effects independently of subject matter.
He experimented with vertical and horizontal formats, surface and depth and worked with irregular linocut blocks that were overlapped to suggest movement and the unfolding of time in space.
Access to a print studio, new and varied resources and the sharing of knowledge turned Gardiner's interest in linocuts to the making of etchings and woodcuts.
A fellow Masters student at Tokyo's Geijutsu Daigaku, Flavin specialised in paper making techniques and eventually settled permanently in Japan.
According to the art critic, Patrick McCaughey, Night Rift, 1983, a colour woodblock acquired from the exhibition by Griffith University, Brisbane, exemplifies the way Gardiner built up the surface texture of his prints to create a shadowy and mysterious world.
By 1988 this interest in the detritus of Japanese street culture had developed into a series of unusual viewpoints of the city and construction sites taken from high vantage points such as Thirty-Views, 1989, and in collages of packaging, billboards, magazine stands and ads.
Visits to Italy in 1989, Chicago, and to Boston, New York and Washington in 1990 provided additional subject matter for Gardiner to record daily rituals, people and events as he surveyed city streets, forms and buildings under construction and in ruin.
The works he produced were based on his experiences and material that he had sourced in Japan, including photographs and extensive visual diaries that he sometimes completed in less than a week.
Dark in tone, Gardiner limited the presence of light by drawing on Japanese cinematic traditions to create a shadowy world filled with tension in which the spectator was drawn in.
[10] During the late 1990s and early 2000s Gardiner started to go on regular fortnightly sketching field trips with his Box Hill TAFE colleagues Sue Shaw and Laurel McKenzie.
Many of these works were assembled for a posthumous exhibition organised for Judith Gardiner by their friend Kate Bêchet at Brightspace Gallery, St Kilda, in 2009.