Linda Ekstrom
Carpinteria, California
Carpinteria, California
Bio: Linda Ekstrom received her MFA in Studio Art from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she has taught in the Book Arts Program in the College of Creative Studies since 2000. Her text and book works and sculptures have been exhibited in both solo and group exhibitions nationwide. Ekstrom’s work has been reviewed in Art in America, Sculpture Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and numerous other publications. She has presented lectures on the subject of religion and contemporary art at several venues, including Yale University and Union Theological Seminary in New York. The artist has also published reviews and articles on these subjects. Her artworks are included in various public and private collections.
Statement: Altered books are central to my practice for their material qualities and emblematic meaning. I approach the book as a cultural and symbolic object, and as a container of history, narrative, and memory to transform and rearrange the book anew. The possibilities are limitless in the ways the book might take shape beyond ordinary, literary arrangements. Text lines are cut, columns of words are twisted into long ropes, fragments and phrases are rolled into spherical forms, books are tightly wrapped and closed using thread, and more. These objects question the way we read. Despite their altered state, all remains; even though only bits of words and isolated letters might be revealed, it is all there, re-formed anew. And, ultimately, the work offers to the reader an experience through the senses, an alternative way of reading through visual and tactile methods. At times I feel as if I am working backward as I move forward, within the space of the writers’ texts and the binding together of their words, and the new artistic forms that emerge. It is as if I am remembering within this space of experience. As Gaston Bachelard writes in Poetics of Space, “Meaning unfolds as the form remembers itself in the hands of the artist, a working backward.” By holding in tension opposing states of materiality--those being the original notion of “book” and the unexpected ways of rethinking visually what “book” and “bookness” mean--I find my way through the simultaneous action of undoing and remaking.
Statement: Altered books are central to my practice for their material qualities and emblematic meaning. I approach the book as a cultural and symbolic object, and as a container of history, narrative, and memory to transform and rearrange the book anew. The possibilities are limitless in the ways the book might take shape beyond ordinary, literary arrangements. Text lines are cut, columns of words are twisted into long ropes, fragments and phrases are rolled into spherical forms, books are tightly wrapped and closed using thread, and more. These objects question the way we read. Despite their altered state, all remains; even though only bits of words and isolated letters might be revealed, it is all there, re-formed anew. And, ultimately, the work offers to the reader an experience through the senses, an alternative way of reading through visual and tactile methods. At times I feel as if I am working backward as I move forward, within the space of the writers’ texts and the binding together of their words, and the new artistic forms that emerge. It is as if I am remembering within this space of experience. As Gaston Bachelard writes in Poetics of Space, “Meaning unfolds as the form remembers itself in the hands of the artist, a working backward.” By holding in tension opposing states of materiality--those being the original notion of “book” and the unexpected ways of rethinking visually what “book” and “bookness” mean--I find my way through the simultaneous action of undoing and remaking.