Biography

Linda Jules lives and works in Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada. Jules received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Thompson Rivers University (Medal Winner in Fine Arts, 2007) and a diploma in Culture Resources Management from the University of Victoria (1988).  Her prints have been exhibited in Canada, the U.S., Spain, France, England and Northern Ireland, notably at the Northern Print Biennale in Newcastle (2009) and at the Belfast Print Workshop (2010).  She is a founding director of the Kamloops Printmakers Society, a co-operative print artists’ studio. Her prints can be found in private and university collections in North America and Europe.

Exhibition

Container/Contained
The environment without and the individual within, (the container and the contained), I seek to illuminate the natural landscape, the human condition that exists within the landscape and how the two are connected.

My art practice is focused on printmaking and sculpture and my series of printed-paper baskets presents a way to combine the two art forms. A Canadian artist of English and Scottish heritage, I have spent my adult life living on a Canadian Indian reserve. Finding myself “the other” in a close-knit traditional community, I see self-portraiture as a useful lens through which to view and process the historical, racial, cultural and gender-based issues at play in my world.

I base my designs on traditional birch bark basket forms that first nations women across North America have made and used for millennia to store and cook food and to carry water. Using digital images of trees found near my home in British Columbia, Canada, I employ collagraph and screen-printing techniques to simulate bark patterns on the exteriors of the baskets. Trees are recurring subjects in my work; they symbolize my sense of place and are a metaphor for many things – shelter, the family, the natural world and the individual in society.

Placing myself in poses and scenes taken from sources such as folklore, Mayan pottery, Indian residential school photos and archaeological notebooks, I become both human and beast, man and woman, superior and subordinate, colonized and colonizer, transforming my works into very personal explorations of the meanings of power and race, class and gender, guilt and innocence, memory, identity and authenticity.