The Valence Series of works are haptically curative. They are remnants of material investigations and they, like my current physical circumstances, are fragmentary alterations, transitory, and samplers for transformation.

I learned to sew, quilt, knit, and spin from a family of women makers and I studied Textile Surface Design by painting on paper. My default materials are linen, any woven fiber, paper pulp, gouache, and acrylics. Through these materials and mediums I developed a belief in the material language of abstraction.

The Valence works verbalize a range of forms and edges, using burlap and the textural weave and grid of woven fiber, against itself, as subject and matter. Through mono, contact, and stencil printing, the studies and works build a textual surface of layering, letting the textile be itself and paint be paint. Casual draping, fraying, folds, saturations, dripping, and varying surface tensions, speeds, and pressures are all considerations. Instead of a formal conclusionary construct, these works are meant as a less distilled, yet formative affirmation amid cacophony. Expressing an emotive plethora through disrupted aesthetics, these works link displacement and alteration as their conditions, and they play and blur the lines and spaces between high and low; rarified and every day; perception and imagination; known and unknown; careful and messy; and a thread of gathered references making for what Roland Barthes in A Lover’s Discourse describes as an affirmation of an unthought logic.

Trained as a Textile Designer yet thinking and practicing as a painter, Linda King Ferguson maintains studios in Marquette, MI and Nashville, TN. She has a MA from Rhode Island School of Design, MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, and she studied at Penland School of Crafts and Academia Di Belle Arti, Perugia, Italy.