Biography
Linda Ingham lives and works from her coastal studio in Lincolnshire.
“Life is the basis of my subject matter, and, for me, spills into ideas about who we might ‘Be’ – existentially, historically, physically, spiritually. Hence portraiture, the figure, the self, the shadow, the place – a preoccupation with what is ‘inside’ and ‘outside’. This latter has lead me to use the creative process and materials as metaphor, through which I attempt to satisfy who I am when making the work whilst leaving the results to convey what they might to the viewer.
I currently have two strands of work, both concerned with self-portraiture in different ways. Pore project is a work in progress, which will eventually number 300 pieces as a composite installation. Each piece is developed from the facial components of participants in the project who have sat to me, and is constructed through a (to me) satisfying process of layering linen and stitch with traditional sizing techniques and oil paint. The second series of work is concerned with different aspects of self-portraiture and pleasure in process, and arose out of The Nature of Landscape project in partnership with Abbey Walk Gallery – entitles Open Series: During my MA in Fine Art I began to explore using literally raw materials to express elements of self-portraiture and human life in terms of a marriage between the fabric of the land and the inner and outer shell of the self and the spaces we inhabit. Close by my coastal home, coal and clay abound; Upper Cretaceous rock supports Fluvial sands and gravels and blown sand. This stretch of the Humber estuary’s alluvial make-up flows on a tidal pulse that reveals, conceals, and brings to and fro lives and deaths. From the fabric of the land, we find The Open Series of Drawings, Paintings and objects, both found and constructed, are somewhat concerned with the pureness of the material as found and used, unchanged, in its original and natural form as closely as possible – at the point when it is the most ‘itself’ – as it is when working with these elements, that I feel that I am the most myself.”
