Artist Statement

Layers of torn edges and severed forms distinguish Linda Cunningham’s large format drawing/ constructions. The tactile sensibility of her work comes from her interest in the qualities of materials, observed or found. She transforms found materials, a kind of “Urban Mining,” and preserves the qualities of found materials with the material history inscribed in their surface. In the wall-constructions she fuses relief elements, such as exposed structural fragments or sand-cast bronze, shaped by the physical process of the pour. Even the bronze forms she casts from military surplus scrap.

Cunningham’s work is concerned with time, transience and contradictions, and she gravitates to architectural and structural remnants of current and previously existing cultures. She often poses the veracity of the photo-based transferred images against interpretive, fluid calligraphic drawing line and form. With sensually gripping form she tempts the viewer to take in sometimes discomforting, underlying content. Discarded materials such as twisted steel beams & unraveling copper cable from the former German border become metaphors for the transience of 21st C development.

“Neither site nor material have shed their past, but here they emerge triumphant, bearing their industrial scars and creating a new, decidedly-urban, aesthetic”…“History is embedded in their composition, giving depth of meaning to the spiraling, rising arcs which emerge”….. The biomorphic forms of Cunningham’s sculptures recall both a long-forgotten natural past and the very concrete nature of obliterated man-made structures.”
-Sarah Archino
Sculpture Magazine, July/August 2011