Bio

An American residing since 1990 in Everberg, Belgium, Linda Colsh has lived in America, Asia and Europe. A lifelong artist with two degrees in Art History, she exhibits in the US and internationally. Her work is published and in collections worldwide. After serving as the first European Representative, Linda currently serves on the Board of Directors of Studio Art Quilt Associates.

Statement

Making art is something I have always done for the challenge of design and the joy of working with dye, paint, and stitch. The peripatetic life I lead puts me in places of immense inspiration. I draw on all that I see and experience to interpret, reinterpret and present in fiber.

My medium is a pieced, layered and stitched art form in which surface design plays a most important role.

To create my artwork, I turn to my photographs, drawings and writings, as well as the thinking that is an important part of my process. I do a lot of thinking while on my daily 5-mile runs through the fields near my home or during those quiet times when I can let my mind wander in random, roaming ways, or when I can focus on a concept in a more direct, linear way.

Work begins with blank white or black cloth that I alter with dye, discharge and paint. I work with design software to develop images for printing by digital or traditional methods. My process is weighted to designing and preparing content and cloth before the actual stitching together.

My work is often figurative, starting with photographs I take of real people who are, to me, anonymous. In my imagination and on paper, I create a "character" who I place in a setting and surround with items—props—that define the character or the narrative I envision for the character. I work with images on my computer and then with surface design processes to put everything on cloth.

Then, I compose and stitch together squares and rectangles of my surface-designed fabric into designs that tell the stories, make the comments, and express the things I have to say.

I am currently working in several series with themes that focus on aspects of growing old, invisibility, isolation, privacy, identity, and our concepts of what is beautiful (or not). I like the push-pull of looking at something from all sides and then, carrying that looking further by imagining that same thing not there at all. What is important is what is seen, what is not seen and what is imagined.

I love how a walk in the fog sets the mind’s eye working to see more than plain eyesight reveals, to fill in the blanks and imagine what is obscured. I approach making my art with the goal of trying to achieve that combination of the visual with the challenge of mystery.