Linda draws inspiration from her travels to more than 50 countries, from years of living abroad, from extensive research. After distilling the lessons of her experiences and research, she uses her photography to explore and raise awareness of dilemmas, conflicts, and injustices that are unfolding in various locations around the world.
Linda learned photography through books, short courses, visiting museums and galleries, studying others’ work and making mistakes. Her first sculpture, produced in Junior High, was one of the regional winners in San Antonio and was sent to New York to be exhibited there. Originally from Texas, she has resided in the UK for a number of years – but still says y’all!
Project Statement
These works draw attention to individual human lives—lives that are invisible when we look at a map. It is about people and their lands, people and their countries. It begins by identifying nations facing distressing issues: environmental destruction, human rights violations, gender inequality, political upheaval, and even war.
I explore these geopolitical concerns by transforming maps into sculptural forms. I tear, twist, cut, crumple, and reshape them—turning these maps into physical embodiments of the traumas each territory endures. The sculpted forms attempt to evoke both the suffering and the resilience of the people who inhabit these regions. Through this process, maps become something more visceral, expressive, and human.
The final works are photographs of these reconstituted map sculptures. By returning the transformed objects to a two-dimensional format, the photograph paradoxically echoes the flatness of the original map—once again denying the viewer full access to the form. This flattening becomes a metaphor for lost perspectives and suppressed narratives.
Before we could write, we made maps. They are among our earliest tools for understanding the world. A map is often seen as a neutral graphic representation—an objective model of space. But maps are far from impartial. They reflect choices: how to frame, scale, and orient the world. These choices carry ideological weight. For example, the Mercator projection, long dominant in Western cartography, greatly distorts the relative size of continents—shrinking those in the southern hemisphere while enlarging those in the north. Implicit within such distortions is a worldview shaped by power.
Like maps, photography is about perspective and authorship. A snapshot of an idea could describe both. By denying the viewer a full sense of the sculptural forms, these images also question agency: Who gets to see? Who decides what is seen?
Maps depersonalize. These images aim to do the opposite. They invite the viewer to look more closely, to question the narratives behind our most pressing headlines—and, most importantly, to consider the human experiences behind those headlines.
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