ARTIST SUMMARY
Linda Swanson’s art practice centers around large-scale drawing projects that address family relationships and narratives. Her process focuses on understanding relationships and situations such as time, touch, space and concentration.
ARTIST STATEMENT
I make drawings to understand relationships and situations. Time, touch, space, concentration. When my grown daughter was away, in danger and beyond my reach, I held and drew one of her childhood model horses each day until she returned (Drift, 2013). One hundred horses, one hundred days, until she was safe. Sometimes I try to influence events with a line.

I research and write to set(tle) meaning. Articulation, refinement, clarity, editing. Writing steps away from and translates the art endeavor and places it in conversation with an unknown audience. It argues, in a good way.

I dress to cross into social space with an introduction to the kinds of ideas in which I am interested. Accessible, distributed, visible, performative. Clothes move from intimate to public. The affect of design is positive movement towards the future.

A line, a word, a seam allow me to be as specific as possible. There is consolation in this precision.

Seeing a stranger wearing my drawn image of my mother dismantles any notion I had of a closely regulated artist-reading and recognizes overlap in these parts of my life. An archive gives agency to all these activities, without hierarchy or pre-determined relatedness.

STATEMENT OF INTENT
My project is to shift twenty years of my family-based drawing projects from a platform of exhibition/catalogue to archive/research, and in the process to invite analysis, assessment, and reinterpretation, animating new narratives. The active archive, including both past and yet-to-be made work, will be an installation and work-space (spring 2018) involving collaborator-contributors: interior architect-designer, researcher, writer, student interns, and audience-participants.

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