After the Gold Rush
Fabric 21" X 26"
Detail
I am one of those people who is left and right brained; I enjoy solving both technical and artistic problems using the same common ingredient: creativity. My work brings focus and awareness to creating sustainable water resource management in the American west. Most of the west is dessert: the majority of the land receives little or no rain for 6 months out of each year. This makes it difficult to develop agriculture or sustain a large population without human intervention. During the 20th century, huge scale interventions were built to transport water from other states via aqueducts, to catch water in reservoirs using dams, and to pump ground water. These projects are awesome in their magnitude and have an eerie beauty as feats of engineering, yet each destroyed the natural landscape. We rely on this water to live yet we have created an infrastructure that is not sustainable in the long term. My art addresses these issues and invites the viewer to ponder these contradictions in beauty and our long-term strategies for sustainable development.
Silk is the most prominent material in my work. I’m drawn to working with it because of its natural beauty, luster and sensuousness. I use this beauty to encourage people to look hard at issues. I combine a variety of my own adaptations of quilting and surface design techniques to create my textile pieces including machine quilting, hand stitching, trapunto. I hand paint my silks using liquid dyes and a variety of resist methods such as wax and gutta serti.
Copyright ©2005 Linda Gass. Photograph by James Dewrance.