ARTIST STATEMENT
Textile art allows time for the artist to meditate and find answers to questions. For the viewer it is easily accessible, familiar, a silent language of hearth and home. It can speak to them intimately and quickly reveal bias, create subconscious connections, and show the seams, where there are worn out ideas that need to be pieced together in new ways.
Textile work allows me time to get rid of questions that have plagued me and ways of being that no longer served me. Healing is starting to occur. For the viewer this happens instantaneously, and the work sits in the memory longer. Textile work is about memory.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Linda Jurkiewicz lives in Kansas City and began working with fiber in 2005. She credits her upbringing as a first generation Ukrainian-Croatian for her “make-do” attitude and her delight in upcycling repurposed materials, especially “woman’s work” such as dish towels, household items and clothing. Her consequential fiber work incorporates soft sculpture, word play, idiom, embroidery, wall hangings, plush form, sequential dioramas, and installations which delve into the cultural roles of women in America over the last century; roles that are changing, and roles that she pushes viewers to reexamine, to trade nostalgia for empowerment.
Jurkiewicz’s work has been shown in two solo shows in Kansas City galleries in 2022. Her work has been juried into numerous exhibitions locally. Nationally, her work has been included in Amarillo Museum of Art Biennial-600: Textile/Fiber, Amarillo, Texas (2019), Raw – The Exhibition at Indiana University (2018), Sacred Threads in Herndon, VA (2017), The Blue Show at the Core New Art Space (2017) and The Engaged Object at the Foothills Art Center (2016), both in Colorado, and Welcome to My World: Mental Health Awareness through Art at the MIRI Gallery (2016). Salt Lake City, Utah. Jurkiewicz is a member of the Kansas City Artist’s Coalition.
© Linda Jurkiewicz