We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Linda Kamille Schmidt. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Linda Kamille below.

Hi Linda Kamille, thanks for joining us today. Can you talk to us about how you learned to do what you do?

I started sewing when I was around 3-4 years old, making clothes for my dolls. My mom let me use her big sewing machine. My mom was always sewing. We probably went to the fabric store once or even twice a week. I watched what she did and listened carefully to her conversations with friends and family about the projects she was working on. When I started to make my own clothes, I followed patterns and figured out how to put everything together on my own. Sometimes I worked with my mom on piecing quilts together. I watched my great-grandmothers and the Mennonite women at church make quilts and listened to them discuss various sewing projects.

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.

I am an artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. I grew up in Topeka, Kansas, but spent a lot of time in Central Kansas (the flat part of Kansas) where my extended family is from. In my work I create geometric fabric collages and hanging fabric pieces with layers of colorful panels made from transparent and opaque fabrics.

I use fabric/textiles to explore and challenge my expectations of perfection, the rigidity of traditional rules and what has historically been expected of me as a woman to denote success. My fabric pieces and installations are made by sewing together transparent and opaque textiles. Because fabric is so prevalent in our lives and our relationship with it is so personal, the types of materials I use can stir up memories of many things such as childhood, special events, personalities, life styles, ethics, wealth and privilege. My fabrics range in cost and quality from thrift store finds and bargain bin remnants to high end silks. The stitching is done both by machine and by hand, sometimes neat, sometimes unpredictable and haphazard, often frayed, many times ripped apart and reassembled, leaving holes that expose a trail of my process.

There is an architectural element to my work; I am building these pieces forward from my past. They are constructive and positive, hence the prevalence of bright colors. The transparent and opaque layers overlap, leaving places where you can see through the piece into the distance. Opaque fabrics create a visual block but the color can change if something transparent is layered on top.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

I studied painting and drawing in graduate school at the University of Iowa. For most of my career I have primarily made 2D paintings and drawings. At a time when I was especially busy and in the middle of an artist residency, I was invited to be in a group show in my studio building. I planned to hang a painting that I had already made. After committing, I discovered that the curator intended for all of the artists to work outside of their primary medium. I almost pulled out of the show but decided I could quickly put something together. When I was younger I always thought I would be a fiber artist. I decided to challenge myself to see if I could translate the ideas I had been working on in my paintings to fiber. I spent almost the entire time at the residency wrestling with this project and it ended up sending me in an entirely new direction with my work.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Switching to fiber was not easy. I often painted on transparent Mylar, working on the front and back with shapes that were both transparent and opaque. For the above-mentioned show I had planned to paint on several pieces of transparent silk gauze, hanging them together in layers with the expectation that you would be able to see through the panels and the images would overlap – just like in my paintings. It was a total fail. I ended up dying the painted fabric. When that didn’t work I used color-remover to try and remove the dye. The fabric started to fall apart. A friend and I had just seen the Agnes Martin show at the Guggenheim. The minimal paintings by Martin inspired me to think about using layers of fabric alone, no paint, building up from opaque fabrics in the back to transparent fabrics on top, resulting in a dimensional color field that would emerge from underneath. I found a fabric warehouse and collected the materials I would need. This simple approach worked and at the last minute I had a piece for the show. I continued making different versions of the original piece and it eventually evolved into the work I make today.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.LindaKamilleSchmidt.com
• Instagram: @Linda_K_Schmidt
• Other: https://garveysimon.com/artists/linda-kamille-schmidt

Image Credits
Max Yawney (all except “Vibe”, “Blush” and the profile picture which were taken by the artist)