We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Linda Ganstrom. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Linda below.
Alright, Linda thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?
Deeply Rooted Friendship. Asked to create a figurative ceramics sculpture as a gift to a university in China, I sculpted two over life-size female figures, one featuring the face of a female student with German heritage and the other of a student born in South Korea. The two figures rose from a shared skirt/trunk textured with tree bark, rooted in a base of stone made of figures as their firm foundation. The two women stood side by side, arms wrapped around each other in friendship and support. Installed in the center of a beautiful park gracing the front of a building where Chinese students took classes from American teachers, it was a deeply meaningful piece. It was not to last long. A student climbed on top of the four-foot pedestal and broke the piece with a bat trying to destroy this powerful image of women content in each other’s company. Chinese artists from the university gathered the shards, made molds, and recast the piece. Deeply Rooted Friendship continues to stand in China as a symbol of cooperation and caring between our nations.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers
Specializing in ceramic figures and porcelain portraits, my art is focused on realism that goes beyond beauty to celebrate the worth of individuals, primarily women. Always a creative storyteller, my characters connect with the more feminine forms of sculpture: dolls, mannequins, pandoras and half-dolls, only my figures are life scale. I strive to create engagement and interaction with the viewer, my pieces are designed to be memorable and thought-provoking. Growing up on a rural Kansas farm, I worked in the dirt gardening and playing with the clay, enjoying the realistic impressions of leaves. I shared a creative space with my grandfather who was a welder. Over decades I built on this foundation of passion for the earth and assembling as I learned the skills to sculpt realistic images and design meaningful, stylish sculptures. My art is carefully crafted and almost impossible to make in porcelain, but I love the challenge of doing it. I am proud to honor the individual, their character, body, and face while exposing a deeper connection to their interior, their heritage, values and worth. My works are at home in public spaces such as spas, schools, libraries, or any institution seeking to celebrate the accomplishments of bodies and people through their likenesses. Outdoor works are a bigger challenge due to weathering and vandalism, but anything is possible. Many figures live in private homes.
What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?
Art is for Everyone. Everyone is an artist. Celebration of professional artists locally and internationally in the midst of a creative culture deeply engaged in art as a pastime could be integrated into life. Imagine if the Body World including health, medicine and sport were a pattern for the Creative World. Great numbers of people are increasingly aware they need to care for their bodies, so they engage in physical activity and nutrition as a way of life, they identify with sports teams and love popular chefs. Deep passion and personal sacrifice focus time and resources on beloved professionals focused on singular aspects of the Body World. Top professionals in these fields are celebrated and well compensated. Society could teach everyone to express themselves through the arts for better mental health and as a way to deepen their understanding of self, place and purpose and to build empathy and for each other and our shared home. Art could be a connector between people as they make and experience art. If everyone made, collected, and lived with art, local arts and art travel would flourish.
Is there mission driving your creative journey?
Captivated by a desire to add more and different feminine characters to the vocabulary of art, I am driven to portray the complexity of women’s lives, bodies, and accomplishments. Realism and the challenge of sculpting the human face and form in ceramics then submit it to a firing, so it to a hardens to a state like stone is a perverse motivator. Focused on immortalizing the faces and forms of ordinary people and their extraordinary lives for ten years, I body cast then sculpted individuals to create life-scale figurative ceramic sculpture celebrating the body, often naked and vulnerable, but powerful and with a purpose. The next decade I focused on trying to find the humanity in extraordinary women of great influence in history and switched to mixed media skirts supporting porcelain half figures. Increasingly realistic these painted figures mine the uncanny valley as they startle and demand attention. They command respect and honor not only for their person but their achievements and influence as female leaders whose complexity and depth is woven into their expressions, gestures, and costumes. A series celebrating great Art Mothers and Death emerged responding to the Covid crisis. Currently, I am focusing on heads and busts trying to capture the intensity of an individual in their facial expression and hair. Desiring to add more unflinching portraits of women into the field my art strives to display the value of women “Beyond Beauty”.
Contact Info:
- Website: lindaganstrom.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lindaganstrom/?hl=en
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/linda.ganstrom/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lindaganstrom
- Twitter: @LganstroLinda
- Other: https://www.pinterest.ie/lindaganstrom/linda-ganstrom-art/ https://snwgallery.com/artist-biography.php?artistId=260290&artist=Linda%20Ganstrom https://leopoldgallery.com/artist/linda-ganstrom
Image Credits
Sheldon Ganstrom, photographer