I have been working as a full-time artist and exhibiting in New Zealand since 1980. After graduating from the Canterbury School of Fine Arts (Dip FA Hons, 1983), I began exploring ways of working with the concept of montage. I was interested in the active sense of montage as a causal factor in our ways of seeing and of communicating what we see or want to have seen.
These initial explorations led to the investigation of how I might take the very concept of ‘painting’ out of the framework of its cultural and social constructs, and reframe it as an element of that montage. To this end I began working on installations in which the conceptual apparatus of ‘painting’, as a cultural expression in the language of western art’s traditions and practices, was isolated, exposed, and then used to contribute to, rather than comprise, the whole of an installation work.
As part of the development of this approach in 1988 I began working with images from existing paintings. By using existing images as the structural basis for my work it became possible to isolate the notion of ‘painted image’, and place it in montage relation to the paintings themselves, to my own subject matter, to the cultural and social context informing my perspectives, and to my craft as an artist.
My approach, therefore, is largely abstract; the notion ‘painting’ becomes a reality of medium. In this way I am able to deliberately acknowledge the images’ elements of time, place and subject matter, which taken together, synthesize the context of cultural language traditions which give my painting meaning, while at the same time fusing them into a single element of montage.
Part of this development of my work is the intention to take it outside of the boundaries with which I am most familiar. My work takes place in a relatively new post-colonial environment, and reflects the ways in which antecedent cultural languages are re-worked in that context. I want to take my expression of that reworking and display it in the broader context of different, varied or divergent cultural languages.
Influences
Linda James has worked as a practicing artist in New Zealand for the last twenty-five years and has exhibited widely throughout New Zealand. She received a Creative New Zealand grant in 2003, and has been a recipient of the Olivia Spencer Bower Art Award, as well as being a runner up in the VISA Gold Art Award. Linda also participated in the Artists in the Sub-Antarctic Scheme. In 2002 Linda was Artist in Residence at Avonside Girls High School in Christchurch.
Key exhibitions have included Sleep in the Forest, Dreams of the Sea, 2006, at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Christchurch, Other People, 2004, at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Christchurch, Out Of the Chaos 11 at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Christchurch in 2002, Disegno Interno at the Robert McDougall Art Gallery in 1996 (which toured to the Judith Anderson Gallery, Auckland and the Jonathan Jensen Gallery, Christchurch), and Narrative of War: Drawing Installation at the Rangiora Public Art Gallery in 1999.
An article by Emma Bugden about Linda's work can be found in the Art New Zealand Journal. Spring Issue 2003.
