Statement for the Artist Collective Spartanburg, South Carolina:
The works submitted for your consideration convey the disparities of my studio practice at present. My large sculptures have taken one path, grief has taken my drawings in another path, and just sheer visual interest in some objects has taken yet another. Usually, I work in series to exhaust the parameters of ideas. Covid certainly made every decision in my shop more urgent and uncertain especially the idea of “co-morbidity”. This isolation brought a lost autonomy that made working through these emotions a necessity. Each work finished in the grieving path, shows one contemplative aspect of 2020 to present. Some testimony to the darker physical and emotional barriers, confusion, and sadness of these days seemed important to commit to paper. In Memorium, Covid Series 6 is a document and a funeral image for the estimated 14.9 million as well as for the loss of my husband of 50 years. The stress of the “cures”, “monitoring”, and the safety separation of “masking” are indeed emotionally and physically debilitating. Covid Series 5 is a reminder of the numerous protection devices, vestiges from my own collection that for some reason I find difficult to throw away. These two Covid Series works are compositionally chaotic still life works for now stilled lives. Rather than choosing formal color strategies, emotional and symbolic color seems more appropriate for my continued intense engagement with these drawings.
Counteracting the grief of the Covid Series is a need. Observed forms such as My Daughter’s Chandelier is mesmerizing and joyful in its reflective realities and abstracted exaggerations. Charcoal, watercolor, inks, graphite, pastels all interest me for different reasons and I experimented with some combinations that I found to work well for the many differing surfaces and plan blocks. It is indeed an uplifting, welcome though maybe temporary divergence in my studio efforts.
Linda McCune, 2025
Lindawilliamsmccune.com
