An artwork has been evolving in between paintings over the last year or so (2024). It’s a slow burn evolution and I like that. Each component piece is an independent piece in its own right, yet it is also moving towards being an installation. It is unfolding, and I do not want to rush it. I hope others will see this one finished. For me, this work has significance in its provenance in Wales.

The following is exists an element of what will be with the Talismans Installation:

In Eryri in the beautiful land of the dragon; some heartwood, sapwood, shoots, roots, boughs and branches, all originally seeded in a bole’s fertile foundation, are whipped by wind, licked by lightning and torn by tempest.  Displaced and forsaken, those woody tissues relinquish the land of their nurture and surrender to the sea. Therein to drift, tumble and toss in salty ebb and flow, in turbulence, undertow, flows, riptides and eddies.

Leached and buffed in briny cross-currents, buoyed in mystic mists, nuzzled by sunrays, sprinkled by moonbeams and made magical by starlight. Changed. 

Each becomes fathomed and enchanted, fashioned with an inherited sea-song absorbed from the ocean’s acoustic energies. No longer a piece, segment, part, or even a fragment, now an entirety, matured and waiting.

Beneath spectral skies where indigos and greys sear into silvers, golds, and magentas by a setting sun’s last caress on water, driftwood gains its enchantment. In time, and on Indifferent tides, the sea delivers a liminal journeyed driftwood to shore.

In meandering beach-comb pilgrimages, on soft footprint etched sand and over the gentle clunk-clatter of rock against rock, driftwoods are chosen by me, collected, and carried lovingly to the studio, washed, and rested.

Wood that once drifted, now dwells in the studio. There is no hurry, time is bided until the right moment arrives. I am given a sense of its journey, its strength, and its readiness for the next phase. To evolve and become a work of art, an amulet, a talisman that will bridge two worlds: that of the visible and the invisible. In the wood-that-drifted is memory and knowing, knowledge and spirit gathered by the journey. It can never go back, for the journey was a one-way untraceable unrepeatable voyage.

There may be a sense of longing toward the intangible, a place that does not exist. Hiraeth (a Welsh word that has no direct English translation), Instead the journey must go forward, and for that to happen, the Talisman will enter a symbiotic state with another, perhaps on an astral plain if there is such a place, and will come to rest. It will fuse in spirit with one who understands and accepts the gift it brings, the openings and mysteries of life. and where it happens, death.

In the studio my hands are guided by a silent, Shamanic song of each individual piece in the emergence of its next phase. Through the language of artist’s materials, acrylic paint-skins, pen and ink, I make strata-like markings, and the metamorphosis began in turbulence completes in the tranquillity of the studio.

Each paint-skin has also completed its own transformational journey, a journey from paint to unique paint-skin. Merged, the wood-that-drifted and paint-skin form a perfect synthesis, their stories meet, become one and the spiritual song of the sea becomes the song of the world.

Linda Sgoluppi Art