We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Linda Plaisted a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Linda, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

My series How the Lights Gets In was created in response to a good friend’s terminal cancer diagnosis, which landed like a grenade amid the constant bombardment of dark and disturbing news we have all seen recently. Reeling, I was looking for a way to express my own grief and society’s collective despair, so I used my art as a therapeutic practice; turning to nature, searching for light in a dark time.

The words of an old Leonard Cohen song rang true-

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in

The ancients once believed that the stars were holes in the sky where ancestors looked down on us from above, eyes shining. In this series I created work that layers my original photography of the natural world with vernacular photographs and collected paper ephemera into unfixed collages. I then painted on an abstract dot pattern, rephotographed the pieces and poked hundreds of tiny holes in the resulting prints, adding places for light to get in and love to shine out. It’s a multi-step, multi-disciplinary process that synthesizes my practice in photography, collage and mythology to alchemize the dark materials of grief into light.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I am an award-winning American multi-disciplinary artist whose creative practices include photography, collage, painting and encaustic. My work has been exhibited extensively in galleries across the United States and abroad. I have also illustrated book and magazine covers for major publishers and contributed to publications such as Lenscratch, Shots Magazine and Artdoc Magazine. I am a 2024 and 2023 Photolucida Critical Mass Finalist and 2023 Julia Margaret Cameron Award Winner.

I have been an artist since birth and went do art school to pursue my calling. After losing one of my twin daughters at birth years ago, I spent more than a decade severed from my creativity after an inconceivable degree of tragedy. It took the shock of another series of losses to shake me awake and alive creatively. Once the tap was turned back on, I began to create prolifically in a continuous flow state as if my inner artist was making up for lost time. In the last two years alone I have had my work shown in seventy nine exhibitions and publications around the world. As a woman of a certain age, I had to start all over again in this second act of my life and I am proud of myself for making the very steep and treacherous comeback from grief to growth. I have much still to do in the world.

Each piece I create now tells a story by pushing beyond the boundaries of medium into myth, using traditions of collection, synthesis and cultural interpretation. I want to make work that looks to the past to help us find strength in the present. Approaching my work as both artist and historian, I use my unique visionary practices to champion women and the natural world, often using vernacular photographs to reconnect with lost ancestors. Layering my original photography and paintings with found images and collected ephemera, I create photographic mixed media pieces with translucent veils of narrative; layers of time and memory bleeding through one another, seeking a deeper truth.

With my education in fine art, photography and creative writing I have so much to share. I have acted as artist-in-residence in public and private schools and universities, teaching photography and art workshops and sharing inspiring artist talks. I also now accept commissions to create meaningful works of art using clients’ images of their family members to connect with and honor their ancestors .

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

Though I attempted to continue working as an artist after my first child was born, I found it very difficult to devote as much time to my art as I wanted because I was a full-time hands-on mother without the benefit of childcare, family or community nearby to help. It’s an all-too-common story for women, but for someone with a creative passion, it was quite disheartening to have no time or outlet for my ideas. I did illustrate several book covers and participate in gallery shows when I could, but the demands of early childhood care were too intense to allow me the time and freedom to advance my work in any meaningful way. When my son was a toddler, I went through a traumatic pregnancy, suffering the loss of one of my twin daughters at six months gestation. After months of critical bedrest, laboring to give birth to both twins- one living and one not, was a harrowing experience, compounding grief upon grief. As a result of this devastating loss, I spent the next decade and a half, functional yet depressed and severed from my true creative expression.

After nearly a decade of blocked creativity, I finally found the courage to dive down to a dark place I had been for many years reluctant to revisit. The catalyst for these old wounds breaking open was the overwhelming cloud of collective grief hanging over society in recent years as we are constantly bombarded by heartbreaking images of wars and natural disasters. To process my own grief and overwhelm in the face of events past and present, I used archival photographs of my living daughter, layered with paper collage elements to reflect the ephemeral nature of memory and the fragility of life. After all, paper ultrasound printouts are all that I have left of the child I never got to hold. My series Lost and Found unveils the aftermath of profound loss on the mother and daughter who lived and my experience of willingly going down into the underworld to retrieve my lost creative soul and bring it back into the light.

While each piece in the series came forth weeping, I now re-emerged from the underworld after that cathartic effort into the light of my full creative power. After all those years estranged from my creativity it took a massive amount of inner work to break me out of that megalithic creative block. You find me here today only a few years out of the frozen state I was in for so long. In my 50’s, I am a re-emerging artist- having to start all over again to rebuild my work from square one. There is no time to lose, so I now use my daily work as a therapeutic practice to process what is happening in my life and in the world at large. My creative expression heals me daily and hopefully inspires others as well. Don’t give up. It’s never too late.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

If you look through my body of work over the past several years you will see a very clear mission statement driving my creative journey; To tell the untold stories of Women and Mother Nature.
When undertaking the role of family historian while researching my genealogical tree, I was incredibly inspired by the previously unknown stories of my maternal ancestors. All these thousands of grandmothers, aunts and cousins I had never known existed because History tells His story yet erases the lives of women. Always overshadowed by the achievements and recognition clearly acknowledged in the records of their husbands, brothers and sons, these ancestral women also had lives worth remembering, stories worth reading. Often the only record of their unthinkable losses and heroic fortitude in the face of adversity is written in the dates of their emigrant journeys or their children’s deaths- far too soon- from then-untreatable fevers, now-preventable accidents or the casualties of war or famine. When I make a piece of art about a woman, she is meant to symbolize all these women- every woman. So too, when I make a piece of art about a tree, she is meant to symbolize every tree, all of nature, each of us as part of nature. I speak for the inherent wisdom, beauty, dignity and power of women and the creative force that thrums with life in nature and all of us. It is time we reconnect to our ancestral roots and to each other, and to realize that we, like the trees, are all interconnected and dependent upon each other for survival.

I am currently working on a new series called The Lost Matrix – mixed media collage/assemblage pieces that explore the societal loss of community and the yearning for deep rooted connection to each other and our ancestors as a source of resilience and strength in challenging times. I used my original photography and drawings layered with vernacular ancestral photographs, collected ephemera and waxed cotton thread, then finished with encaustic and ink on cradled birch panel. Encaustic is a particularly apt medium for this project because it is an ancient substance composed of natural beeswax and tree resin that, forged in fire, bonds fragile materials into something stronger.

Matrix- Late Latin “womb,” also “source, origin,” from māter (genitive mātris) “mother,” the root of all things.

“Like fungi and plants, we are co-becoming with our ecosystems. Ecosystems that are ruptured, polluted, and confused by our culture’s deracinated idea that you can live without a root system. But if we are going to survive, we are going to need to tie our roots to other roots.”

– Sophie Strand

Contact Info:

• Website: http://lindaplaisted.com
• Instagram: @themanymuses

Image Credits

Linda Plaisted