Island Traces (Blue) - Linda Norris

Linda is an artist based in Wales who came to glass in 2011 from a background in landscape painting. She was drawn to the medium’s elemental, transformative nature and its capacity or both material and metaphorical expression. Her work has received several awards and has been widely exhibited.
Linda’s current practice explores how landscape can reveal traces of the past and the people who came before us. This vessel brings together glass, soil and archaeological memory, inspired by the discovery of a Bronze Age burial urn shard on Skokholm Island. It explores the enduring traces of human presence embedded within the Welsh landscape.
Soil gathered from the archaeological landscape is enclosed within the glass, transforming earth from the site into part of the vessel itself. These fragments of place carry geological, ecological and cultural histories, suggesting how the past remains embedded within the material world.
The vessel’s form draws on the burial urn as a container for memory, ancestry and transformation, connecting ancient ceramic traditions with contemporary glassmaking. Silica provides a material thread between these histories: a natural resource transformed through fire.
As an introductory work within Material Traces, the vessel establishes the collection’s central concerns: how materials carry memory, how landscapes hold traces of human activity, and how glass can reveal and reimagine these connections.