Linda Wallis

Linda Wallis is a Nottingham, UK-based artist working primarily in colored pencils. With a love of nature and a sense of the bizarre, her drawings teeter between the plausible and the ridiculous—depicting a strange array of objects and shapes that appear to represent a tangible world. In 2017, Linda made a dramatic break from painting city and townscapes to focus on what she believes are manifestations of her unconscious. By reappropriating pattern, form, shape, and texture from everyday and ordinary things, she creates an eccentric array of playful worlds on paper. Linda’s work is held in private collections in the United States, China, Ireland, Tasmania, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom.


Artist Statement

My current work has developed through creative exploration. In 2017, I began a series of drawings influenced by automatism and unconscious doodling. Having used colored pencils when I was a child, the rediscovery of this medium at this time brought about a more playful and immediate approach.

My creative process became one of subduing, as far as possible, any intentional thought. The drawings I create are freely reproduced on paper whilst focusing on a movie, documentary, or even a quiz show. Thus, if my mind is occupied, my imagination is free to express itself.

This unorthodox approach draws out often inexplicable themes, many of which reveal common anxieties about the world we live in. Although it’s important to me that I resist analyzing my work too much, over time, I have come to realize that my drawings communicate personal concerns such as fragility, power, control, entrapment, exposure, and exclusion. Within these themes, human, animal, and plant life randomly mutate within abstracted landscapes. These biomorphic worlds illustrate a kind of resistance to the ensuing environmental crisis, and like dreams, they are a summary of my greatest anxieties.


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