Artist Statement
Linda Rosalia Kosciewicz was born in Scotland and trained in painting at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee followed by fine art painting conservation at Northumbria University. She worked for many years as a conservator in Australia and in Scotland for Government and also as a policy maker for national government. Her art practice encompasses photography, printmaking, mixed media, video, sound, music, and drawing.
For much of her artistic career she has focussed on people, society and the human condition and has returned again and again to the human body and face as her creative inspiration. Another passion has been the natural environment and she is a keen gardener.
In 2012 she was won the Pauline Fay Lazarus prize for work based on the human body and in 2010 and 2012 respectively, she received Visual Arts Awards from Fife Council, Scotland for photography and multi media projects. The first “Nine thoughts: A riff on fragmentation and loss” about the impacts of dementia on close family members included music written and performed by herself. Mirror Mirror considered body image and the male gaze.
She trained the camera on herself in her White Series; a series of photogravures and video based on a performance of gestures and movements inspired by women’s relationship to the colour white and the poetry of Sylvia Plath. Images from this series have been exhibited throughout the UK, in France, Poland and Malaysia.
Artist Bio
In 2011, she was a finalist in the International Photography Open Salon, Arles, France with the image “Breath of Life” from the series. That same year images from the White Series were published in the Plath Profiles and more recently again in 2019.
Dance and music were key elements of the video and photography project Transformations: Life Portraits that she carried out for the University of Edinburgh. It explored life course and movement through ageing bodies. Using four volunteers from the Lothian Birth Cohort, she choreographed a sequence of movements which she set to a deconstructed piece of music from 1936, the year of their birth.
Portraiture and culture were the subject of Culture Club which took as its subject ten members of the Scottish Arts Club, Edinburgh. In 2013 she participated in a joint project between the Scottish Poetry Library and Edinburgh Printmakers Workshop and worked with writer Dorothy Alexander to produce polymer photogravures and a video based on random experimental text inspired by The White Series.
In response to the Ukraine war she predicted a photogravure series repurposing the Greek myth of the labyrinth and the Minotaur to examine the seemingly endless cycle of suffering and violence in the human condition.
She is currently researching the stories and culture associated with nature. This work has led on from her exploration of the story of Daphne who was turned into a laurel tree.
