Artist
Linda Norris
‘Fragment Dresser’
Linda is a painter and glass artist based in Pembrokeshire and was commissioned alongside three other Welsh and Irish artists to create new work that spoke to the following themes:
- Personal or collective pilgrimage or journeying
- Sacred Places
- Celtic diaspora, ancestral heritage and a longing for home
- Creative Storytelling that connects North Pembrokeshire and North Wexford
Linda’s work centred around the idea of pottery sherds found in most people’s gardens that tell a story of domestic life and ordinary people. Her initial proposal was to get people to send her found sherds with a ///what3words location tag and a story associated with them, however, as she began work it transpired that within the Republic of Ireland, these are considered archaeological artefacts and it would be illegal to do so. Instead, Linda started working with Welsh poet, Emma Baines, to run a series of in-person and online creative writing workshops to which participants brought along found sherds and responded with poetry and prose.
“Thank you so much for an incredibly fruitful set of workshops. The poetry we wrote is given a new fragility and dimension by your artwork.” Ali McGuire, workshop participant, Ireland.
The handwritten poems were then directly incorporated into Linda’s artwork, the Fragment Dresser. This exceptionally beautiful piece used glass combined with light projection to exploit the relationships between transparency and opacity achievable by sandblasting clear glass.
A video of Linda making the artwork:
Linday chose the dresser as it is an iconic piece of furniture central to domestic life in both Ireland and Wales. It is passed down through generations and is evocative of ideas about ‘home’ and ‘family’. The dresser is a repository for memory and shared experience and is also an item of cultural display.
A video of the final artwork:
Several offshoots of the project have emerged, including:
- Bards ‘n Shards – a piece commissioned by Narberth Museum, creating ceramic pieces responding o the writing that took place in the creative writing workshops with Emma Baines
- Shards Jewellery – making jewellery from found shards
- Soil Collection – from archaeological sites to use in forthcoming work
- Limpets – gilded 1000 year old limpet shells from the St Patricks Chapel archaeological site, excavated and discarded as part of the archaeological dig commissioned by Ancient Connections.
You can download Linda’s full report on her Ancient Connections residency below:
Click here to get in touch with Linda or to find out more about her work.
