Pushing Against The Wire & Barbed Comment

Pushing Against The Wire was an exhibition curated by Barry Nicols at the Roadmender Gallery in Northampton in 1992.

I was already working with barbed wire when the invitation to exhibit arrived. I used the opportunity to extend the 'Barbed Comment' work into an Installation.
Extract From The Exhibition Catalogue:

“Pushing Against the Wire”, the title was born from a two-fold vision of artists struggling to get work shown in a town starved of contemporary arts, and of creative people in general, pushing at the boundaries of their chosen disciplines, taking their ideas one step further – the essence of creativity.

From the Catalogue:

Linda Sgoluppi

For some years I have used the structure of the grid. It acts as physical presence within the canvases and as a mental construct. It is both container and contained; mapping the underlying structure of the warp and weft of the canvas. Along with the square construction of the stretchers, it reinforces the actual as well as notional grid. Other materials either reinforce this position or by their nature subvert it.  Standard non-art materials used for collage labels, sheets of standard size paper, (printed) words; the rigid grid is reinforced. When I introduce other materials such as wax, the rigidity of the grid is subverted by the materials plasticity.

Some recent work excludes the canvas and deals with the notional grid; although the form is still an actual grid – It has crossings of intersections that connect yet separate. Language and its deconstruction is another important facet of the work and is integral to it; either by title alone or as an actual physical part of it.