A Conversation With Textile Artist Linda Hall

“Intellectually I understand my work in one way and just intuitively, I understand it in a different way,” Linda Hall said to me. We met a couple of times over the last month or so to talk about her work. She currently has an exhibition at the Thomasville Center For The Arts, Surface Tension, Hall’s work on her own as well as her collaborations with photographer Becki Rutta.

Hall is an artist, she works largely with textiles and in her hands anything at all can become a notion. “I just love the materials,” she told me. “I’m comfortable with them. They are materials that belong outside of the academy. You know, they’re not traditional art materials. So there’s no rules.”

Hall sews creatures and people and animals and monsters, all of them exactly as beautiful as they can make a viewer uncomfortable. Which is a compliment, in case that is not already clear. A significant portion of Hall’s work is wearable art; pieces she has created to adorn a person’s body in one way or another and to make different points or arguments. During the Pandemic years she created a collection of Anxiety Masks. Part wearable art, part sculpture, and sometimes part of a piece of performance art, Hall told me a story that makes up a piece of her inspiration to create the masks.

“Before the pandemic,” the artist explained, “just before the pandemic in Jackson, Mississippi, there was an exhibition of Nick Cave’s work. I was amazed how his soundsuits were all made from things gathered from thrift stores. He was recalling his deep African roots, its shapes and movements. But what moved me is that his entire body was covered or a person who wears it, their entire body is covered. So they’re sort of safe. You can’t tell what gender or what ethnicity they are. So they’re a cross between a superhero and a suit to protect you, like armor.”

They are strange and compelling these masks, and they will draw from you an emotional response. The wearable component feels intimate. After all, it is not often that the viewer is invited to interact so intimately with art. In this instance, a mask becomes a bridge of sorts. We needed more bridges during those years. Things were bleak.

“In a lot of these masks,” Hall told me, “they have these beautiful things that almost look like flowers that are going to explode, buds that are also pustules. They turned out pretty beautiful. The death of George Floyd and issues around race were also very fodder for this series too. And I was relieved that they were Anxiety Masks because there was a lot of anxiety there and there was a lot of darkness. Especially during the pandemic, when there was so much anxiety, just seething under the surface. It gave me a focus. I always had two or three of the masks going at the same time. I found myself really interested in the bubonic plague.”

Though Covid inflicted many horrors, it did not produce the oozing masses for which the 14th century Black Death was named. Hall found herself thinking about the ways the body and viruses and bacterias interact.

It helped, making the work. “It gave me a place to,” Hall said, “it’s a place to aim yourself, to keep your hands busy, keep your mind busy, and feel those feelings a little bit later. You know, I find when I walk into my studio and see it full of these pieces, and I see what they have in common, it sort of informs me of why I did it. There’s a gift there to say, wow, I made all this. This is all something that wasn’t here before the pandemic. It’s evidence that these feelings were felt.”

I like this idea a lot, it sounds like exorcism, if there can be a positive association with that word. I know that I love my work, but that I can use it to hide, as a place to use up the energy from my own anxieties. “You know,” the artist said to me, and her eyes were bright when we locked eyes, “if more people are like us, this is going to be a very productive four years for a lot of people.”

The masks are a small piece of a much larger body of work, but as I’ve indicated above, the materials are a throughline, Hall spends thousands of hours with needle and thread. As my regular readers will know, I am very interested in processes. There are an infinite number of ways to find solutions to creative problems, to work out any conceivable challenge. I love that about art, and I believe this is part of what makes art such a vital component to our culture, why it feeds us when we have appetites we cannot articulate. I asked Hall how she makes her work.

“Usually what I do is I will take a form that is already made, like a cast of my head,” Hall explained with a smile. “I’ll wrap it with fabric, like quilted fabric, so that I’ll have something pretty, that I could then put back on later. After I take the form out, I put it on and then cut my eyes out and embellish the surface, so it gives me a very flesh-like sort of heavy surface where I can really add a lot of embellishment to it, that kind of quilted fabric.”

Where does she get all this quilted fabric? “I go to thrift stores, antique stores. Friends give me quilts that are falling apart that their grandmother gave them and they don’t know what else to do with them. A lot of times I’ll start with a quilted fabric that is not a handmade textile; that’s going to go underneath. And I sort of let it evolve as it wants to go. I just look at the materials that I have.”

I asked her if she had figures in mind in advance of the making part, if she felt like there were characters or archetypes. “They sort of evolve as I make them,” Hall mused. “They sort of inform me of what they’re going to be a lot of times. Intellectually, I think what I’m doing is telling my mother’s story, story, my grandmothers, my great-grandmothers, and giving it a ferociousness that they were never allowed or didn’t allow themselves to express, or there was not a place in our culture for them to express it. And I feel like I’m from a generation where I can, you know, have some minor notes. It doesn’t all have to be happy and functional and it can be a bit ferocious. Nature is a big theme in my work. And I particularly love it, to have that nature making marks on the surface or being covered with bees or with fur, that sort of thing.”

My mother taught me to sew, I’m currently teaching my daughter to sew, and though I know many people who are exceptionally deft with a needle, the largest demographic is absolutely female. I asked the artist who taught her.

“My mother sewed,” Hall told me, “my grandmother and great grandmother sewed and my mother tried to teach me to sew, but it was with the sewing machine and it was so labor intensive. So I think I gained the love of fabrics. And sort of storytelling through them, but I just taught myself by spending time with the materials.”

Surface Tension, Linda Hall + Becki Rutta is on exhibition at the Thomasville Center for the Arts until June 6, 2025.